Making Sense: a cartography of the contemporary essay

Ursula Biemann, Johanna Billing, Arnaud des Pallières, Pierre Creton, Kevin Jerome Everson, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, Jean-Luc Godard, Mike Hoolboom, William E. Jones, Deimantas Narkevičius, Noëlle Pujol, Hito Steyerl, Tariq Teguia, Dimitri Venkov, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ingrid Wildi Merino and Olivier Zabat

Presented by Bertrand Bacqué, Cyril Neyrat, Véronique Terrier Hermann and Clara Schulmann, with assistance from Lucrezia Lippi.

Making Sense: a cartography of the contemporary essay attempts to outline the constantly changing and expanding territory of the essay film – a territory with three focal points that act in terms of both attraction (rootedness in the past, associative logic, the impact of encounters, the joys of editing) and production (variety of forms and genres, operations and screenplay, intuition, reappropriation, trickery, trial and error): (1) Reflections, like the Montaigne-type essay, proposes a reinterpretation of ‘I’ not as a mere subject but as a thinking form; (2) Inscriptions involves a rereading of the archives, coupled with a rewriting of history or stories; and (3) Explorations sets out to discover the world and others, driven by a wish for cultural and political investigation.

Three screens, in other words, that reflect a changing landscape and contrast the shifts and movements of the essay – three lines drawn between different ways of doing things.

A first screen, between Reflections and Inscriptions, sets out the essay in the first person: on the one hand a return to the subjective, but at the same time the contemporary scene’s insatiable wish to reread the document, archives or history. The second screen moves between Inscriptions and Explorations, discovering and chronicling the world, a place of encounter. In this case the essay conducts the inquiry, constructing an outlook on the world. The third screen, linking Explorations to Reflections, seeks ways and means of telling stories. Goodbye to past illusions of objectivity, of cinéma-vérité – and back to a kind of fiction that can take its cue from documentary logic.

The three screens offer a cartography of the essay: deliberately uneven, and full of shifts and crossovers. The essay, as an anti-discipline, compels us to rethink our cinema vocabulary. Each film is chosen for its unusual way of marking or occupying a territory, and capturing our gaze – there is nothing restful about essay cinema.

The exhibition is presented by the research group Start Making Sense! The essay transformed by contemporary cinema and art.

Making Sense opens with nine Prologues to the essay, a project by Ursula Biemann with Jean Bacchetta, Mélanie Badoud, Etienne Chosson, Léa Graham, Emmanuelle Griffon, Maëlle Gross, Raphael Harari, Deborah Helle, Line De Kaenel, Yi Chun Kuo, Catherine Ofwono Anyango, Florence Pellacani, Sophie Perrier, Thomas Reichlin, Julie Sando, Zahra Vargas and Julie Yara Zimmermann, students from the Cinema/Cinema of the Real and Information/Fiction faculties, supervised by Michel Favre and Frank Westermeyer.