Our signed stories carry culture. They are a site of resistance and pride.
-- Chelle Destefano, Deaf artist

At the peak of pandemic isolation and collective inner reflection, Deaf and Deafblind storytellers were invited to respond to an open question: what is it you wish you had said to someone, or could say now? The result was What I Wish I'd Told You (2022) by Australian artists Chelle Destefano (Deaf) and Claire Bridge (hearing with Deaf grandparents), an immersive collection of video projections in which over seventy storytellers affirmed Deaf and Deafblind experiences and complex identities using Auslan, a minority signed language and the language of the Australian Deaf community.

Shared on each storyteller’s own terms, this collection is also testament to the ordinariness of what DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark has termed ‘distantism’, meaning ‘a standing apart’ (Clark, 2017). Distantism is what happens when we assume that sound and sight are primary, that any lack of these requires an intervention. Manifesting in the fragmentation of both people and communities, distantism severs Deafblind from Deaf, Deaf from hearing, and everyone from each other, especially through the refusal or imposition of specific communication practices.

What do these stories tell us about the effects of distantism in Deaf and Deafblind languaging, and the collective innovations developed to disrupt it? This research explores distantism via the ordinariness of sign languaging embedded within this creative production, and the role of community arts methods in legitimising the experiences of language minorities historically denied or withheld from public spaces.