by the scars they leave
Video screening
#Agora
In the occasion of Memoria genera Futuro, MACRO presents by the scars they leave, a showcase of short films screened in a loop exploring memory from different perspectives—those of a people, a place, an individual—highlighting its fragility and susceptibility to narrative over the passage of time. The black-and-white images flow in a loop, displaced across times and geographies that are as distant as they are present: Collapse (2009) by the Palestinian duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, El Chinero, un cerro fantasma (2023) by Bani Khoshnoudi, and La Jetée (1962) by Chris Marker.
Nothing distinguishes memories from ordinary moments.
Only later do they become memorable by the scars they leave.
La Jetée, Chris Marker, 1962
Collapse, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme
8’20”, 2009
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, still from Collapse, 2009. Courtesy of the artists.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, still from Collapse, 2009. Courtesy of the artists.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, still from Collapse, 2009. Courtesy of the artists.
Collapse brings together imaginary and actual moments of resistance and loss, an act of excavation that illuminates the deep disruptions that have shaped not only Palestinian lived experience and memory but shared histories of struggle. A literal and poetic displacement resonates throughout the work, in part a meditation on a contemporary Palestinian landscape ruptured by continued colonization of community, memory and narrative. Moments of recurrent potential and incompleteness of resistance are repeated to critically reconstruct past fragments and uncover the suspension of the future in the present. This feeling of continual suspension and relapse, breaks and deadly repetition is played out exploring the overlap between personal trajectories and multiple historical narratives.
El chinero, un cerro fantasma, Bani Khoshnoudi
11’, 2023
Bani Khoshnoudi, still from El chinero, un cerro fantasma, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Bani Khoshnoudi, still from El chinero, un cerro fantasma, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Bani Khoshnoudi, still from El chinero, un cerro fantasma, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
El Chinero is a rugged hill in the desert, located 140 km in the south of Mexicali in the Baja California region of Mexico. Nobody knows since when it bears its name, but everyone has heard of a tragic episode that took place here in 1916… Or were there many such episodes? A few years after the Mexican Revolution of 1910, a massive exodus took place within the country, as deportations and violence targeted Chinese and Asian migrants who had settled in Mexico for many decades. Despite a lack of documentation about the site, it is thought that many people died here while crossing the desert from mainland Mexico. Myth and identity, reality and fiction, ghosts and memory. El Chinerocan in some way be seen as a monument to the memory of these forgotten, anonymous people while not officially being one. A site of tragedy with no traces nor remnants to be seen. How can one fill this memory void with images and artifacts in an attempt to construct an archive where none exists? «In a land controlled by necropolitics that still devours many bodies, Khoshnoudi takes us on an investigation that examines the memory of places and its crucial role in the narration of a nation’s history. Shot in fragile black and white that shifts the focus from the grandeur of the landscape onto smaller traces, El Chinero stands as a warning to the political necessity of resisting oblivion.» (Rebecca De Pas)
La jetée, Chris Marker
29’, 1962
Chris Marker, still from La jetée, 1962. Courtesy of the artist.
Chris Marker, still from La jetée, 1962. Courtesy of the artist.
Chris Marker, still from La jetée, 1962. Courtesy of the artist.
Chris Marker, still from La jetée, 1962. Courtesy of the artist.
«The story is one of perfect simplicity, classic for a science fiction reader. In a Paris devastated by the future, men hiding in some caves experiment on prisoners of war with systems that will allow them to travel through time. The process requires training by traveling first into the past: it is therefore necessary to find a ‘subject’ who has a particularly vivid memory, which will serve as their point of reference. The chosen subject, before the war, as a child, had seen on the great terrace of Orly airport a girl with a wonderful face and a man who suddenly dies at her feet. This memory is used as the reference point; long and patient experiments project him into the past, toward this girl he loves, whom he meets during increasingly extended periods of time, always interrupted by his return to the present, to his scaffolding and drugs. When he has sufficiently encountered the woman and is certain of their mutual love, the experiment is interrupted: he is ready for the journey into the future. In the future, he finds help: the men of the future offer him a source of energy that he takes back with him. Having become useless, he is about to be eliminated; but the beings of the future (who can also travel through time) offer him the chance to join them. He refuses; he wants to find the woman he loves. His wish is granted, and he is projected onto the terrace of Orly, where he runs toward the woman; but he is pursued by his jailers and is killed under the terrified eyes of a child who is himself.» (Paul Louis Thirard, Positif, no. 64-65, 1964)
The event will take place in the auditorium.
Free entry until full capacity is reached.
BASEL ABBAS AND RUANNE ABOU-RAHME work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. Largely their approach has been one of sampling materials both existing and self-authored in the form of sound, image, text, objects and recasting them into altogether new ‘scripts’. The result is a practice that investigates the political, visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text and site, taking on the form of multi-media installations and live sound/image performances.
BANI KHOSHNOUDI was born in Tehran, Iran and grew up in the USA where she studied architecture, photography and film at the University of Texas in Austin and was studio artist at the prestigious Whitney Museum ISP. Her films, installations, and photographs have been shown in museums and art centers like the Centre Pompidou, Fondation Cartier, ICA London, Serralves Foundation in Porto, and festivals worldwide. In 2022 she received the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in Film/Video. In 2024, her work was exhibited at the 60th Biennale di Venise as part of the installation Disobedience Archive in the main exhibit, Stranieri Ovunque/Foreigners Everywhere.
CHRIS MARKER was one of the world’s most highly regarded and experimental figures in cinema. His documentary work includes profiles of the artists Matta and Christo, and film directors Tarkovsky and Kurosawa. Marker’s film works make deliberate use of a restricted visual palette, adopting the techniques of cinema’s silent era, using dissolves, subtitles and montage effects. In the 1990s he began working with new technologies, reworking elements from his earlier film and television for the video installation Zapping Zones (1992). Marker’s video works range from idiosyncratic documentaries to poetic meditations. Among his media-based projects are an interactive CD-Rom entitled Immemory (1998) and the feature film Level Five. Chris Marker (Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve) was born in 1921 at Neuilly sur Seine, France, and died in 2012. He fought for the French resistance during World War II and enlisted as a Paratrooper in the United States Air Force. In the 1950s Marker wrote for l’Esprit and Cahiers du cinéma and was an assistant to Alain Resnais. His work was been presented internationally. Marker was the subject of a film retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was a featured artist of the exhibition Passage de l’imageat the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Documenta X, Kassel, Germany. In 2018 he had a screening at Cannes Film Festival, won the International Critics Prize, and had a major retrospective in Paris.