GENEVA.- "La Jetée" ("The Jetty", 1962) opens with a still image of Orly airport, followed by this sentence, almost as seminal as Chris Marker's film itself: "This is the story of a man, marked by an image from his childhood". LES MARQUES AVEUGLES takes Chris Marker's film as a point of departure, and researches the notion of time and memory, and more specifically the relationship between image and mark, traces, traumatism. If these elements are clearly discernible in the story the film tells, they are equally so in the film's aesthetics – violent contrasts, fragmented images, an impossible return to the past.

The seventeen works of LES MARQUES AVEUGLES use various strategies to illustrate these issues, which make use, moreover, of formats as different as projection, slide show, play between still and moving images, performance and installation.

If the image's mark necessarily relates to memory and remembrance, it implicitly also evokes – and perhaps even more strongly – the sequels of this stamp. Thus Wendelien van Oldenborgh examines, through a flowing slide show, memory and the effects of a recent past : from post-Fordist precariousness to participation in various forms of cultural production ; the strata of images and stories mingle and repeat. Memory – the difficult appropriation of a painful past and its own efforts and duty to remember – is likewise at the heart of the work of Gitte Villesen, which explores the limits of historical (archive) material in the context of a contemporary appropriation; here the moment is doubly distant as the protagonists are striving to give structure to documents from the Auschwitz trials. Of a more personal nature, the work of Akram Zaatari relates in epistolary and poetic form the break-up between two men, while Rosa Barba confirms her interest in signs, writing and the text, transforming the marks left by engineers into imaginary drawings and narratives. Finally, Brent Green's film – to be screened only once at the cinema – shot using animated stills illustrates a hopeless quest, an ode to love, the cinema and science.

With: Rosa Barba, Pavel Büchler, Hollis Frampton, Louise Hervé et Chloé Maillet, Robert-Jan Lacombe, Chris Marker, Katja Mater, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Margaret Salmon, Hito Steyerl, Gitte Villesen, Akram Zaatari.

The project includes a four-screenings cycle presented at the Grütli cinemas (19.01 – 22.01.2012): Chantal Akerman, James Benning, Brent Green, Isidore Isou, William E. Jones