A thin crack extending from the roof, down the front of the building and into the adjacent lake forms the mise en scene of the film, noted by the narrator when he arrives at the House of Usher.
A cinematic ghost seems to lead the spectator onwards, passing through a landscape of ruins and films and ruins of films that evoke phantoms and fairies …

It opens in the dark, in a corridor; water is flowing … Voices echo in these sewer tunnels; it is the abyss of Munich, under the river Isar. The voices tell fragments of stories: about vanished people, violence, memory
loss—while the camera is now above ground, scanning the city’s façades, including those of the “Third Reich.”
The city appears as a body winding its way through time, past and present. Like a thread through memories,
a spiral runs through it: a shell, a whirlpool, the turn of a staircase, the ever-recurring voices of the past. The film is a collage: it jumbles traces of history and forms of nature, bringing images, voices and sounds from different sources to the same level. A story of living beings and living environments, of fossils which challenge our perception of time.

The film shows the public park of the Villa Torlonia which is built atop of several catacombs. The camera observes and scales the surface, it captures details and long shots from different perspectives. Found footage and contemporary material are superimposed into a portrait of the Villa that never reveals its rationale.
The dialogue between both films in the exhibition suggests that the Villa Torlonia itself is a puzzle piece of history which must be put into place. Maya Schweizer’s works call for acts of contextualisation without providing ready interpretations.

The camera’s gaze rises high above an area in Berlin, where the paths of tourists, homeless people, passersby and police officers cross. Then the gaze sweeps into the interior of a room and we realize where we are: in a watchtower that once controlled the no man’s land where East and West collided. In the background we hear radio broadcasts connecting time and space – a transformation of the regimes of gaze as the transformation of disciplinary architectures. The entire scenario metaphorically short-circuits the architectural and social “interior and exterior” and shows our social order as historically stratified power relations of exclusions, demarcations and transitions.

The film “The Dying Soldier of Les Milles” observes both the memorial Le Camp des Milles – a former internment camp of World War II in an old brickworks in Aix-en-Provence – and the monument of a dying soldier dedicated to the dead soldiers of World War I, World War II and the Algerian War. He’s wounded, leaning on his pockets full of ammunition. The camera moves around the soldier and the square. It takes up the rhythm of the game of petanque at his feet and shows the observer the two places of remembrance in their current appearance.

he hand is also the subject of La Main Seule, a short silent
film using the same sequence in a more experimental and dreamy way.
In a gesture that reminds one of the first forms of painting – those imprints of hands found in the Lascaux grottos – the possibility of an encounter with time is disclosed. It is a very different kind of knowledge then, that can disclose hidden narratives to us.

L’étoile de mer is an experimental navigation in the Mediterranean Sea, mingling underwater shots, silent movies, author’s own video archive and underwater shots, faded-in texts and a sound collage. This image and sound essay is about forgetting and the sea as a point of reference and reflection. The sea is a flowing immaterial space and thus seems conducive to forgetting.

A thin crack extending from the roof, down the front of the building and into the adjacent lake forms the mise en scene of the film, noted by the narrator when he arrives at the House of Usher.
A cinematic ghost seems to lead the spectator onwards, passing through a landscape of ruins and films and ruins of films that evoke phantoms and fairies …