21.25 Maya Schweizer L’étoile de mer
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One after another, they are rendered into language—in clear, plainspoken words tinged with quiet dismay at the relentless, palpable passage of time in these pictures: both private snapshots and widely circulated media photographs, images seared into the collective memory (or at least the narrator’s memory), in which history condenses into personal (life) time, socially lived. They are images from the second half of the 20th century; images that will soon cease to exist, not least because they will be without meaning once there is no one left to imbue them with it.
Ernaux’s line about the disappearance of all images is also found in L’Étoile de mer, a 2019 film by Maya Schweizer. But before that happens, the film plunges into the sea, into the Mediterranean near the small town of La Ciotat, close to Marseille, to be more precise. It begins underwater, floating amid fish in a vast array of colors and patterns. Despite glimpses of stones gently cloaked in green, it’s not entirely clear which way is up and which way is down. There is a weightlessness that leaves direction open. But quickly, in harsh, abrupt cuts, other images come into view—glowing animal eyes in the night, a hand holding a fossil to the camera, huge castoff turbines. Artificial and human-made, the latter take on the radial shape of the starfish whose name the film shares with a 1928 film by Man Ray.
The title is not the only direct reference to the foregone 20th century, its avant-gardes, and its guiding medium, cinema. Like fragments of memory, individual images, certain sentences, or sequences seem to emerge from the waters of the Mediterranean: the famous train filmed by the Lumière brothers in 1895/96 as it enters the station of that same town of La Ciotat in southern France—one of cinema’s primal scenes. Or various intertitles and images from Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961), a landmark film of European postwar cinema. “Do you remember?” asks a male voice from that film’s soundtrack, again and again, over images of the night, only to soon answer itself: “You have already forgotten everything.”
For nearly two decades, Schweizer has been exploring history, the passing of time, and the complex structure of memory in predominantly cinematic works. The quiet and moving piece Manou, La Seyne sur Mer (2011) finds the artist focusing on the life of her own grandmother in a nursing home and the latter’s increasingly fragmented perception of the world. In A Memorial, a Synagogue, a Bridge and a Church (2012), she explores, through long takes and a searching gaze, the monument to the demolished synagogue in Bratislava and its immediate urban surroundings, making palpable the simultaneity of different layers of time in one place. Her two-channel projection Regarde par ici, … Und dort die Puschkinallee (2018), centers on an old watchtower on the border between the former East and West Berlin. On the whole (though not always), these films follow a logic of site, more specifically, of a “site of memory,” a concept developed by the French historian Pierre Nora in the 1980s: place, symbolically charged with the past, becomes a fixed anchor in the unrelenting passage of time.
L’Étoile de mer is a film that contrasts the fixed (and fixing) site with the sea in all its fluidity, its inescapable, perpetual changeability and permeability—understanding water, its image, as a metaphor for forgetting. This oblivion is just as much a prerequisite for our relationship to time and the past as its counterpart, to memory, even if the latter is more readily linked to the concept of history and access to what came before. One could, to draw on cinematic terms, also put it like this: in the usual conception of history, forgetting is in a way the “hors-champ,” that which lies beyond the image itself: undefined and without fixed contours, an invisible yet nonetheless constitutive behind and around, against which the remembered appears as a defined and determined image. Memory: a piece of land to which one clings; forgetting: the water that sweeps one away—elusive, unplaceable, infinite, and never the same. Where the waves of forgetting seem inexorable, memory appears as an active resistance.
Water has been associated with forgetting since ancient times: in Greek mythology, the dead drink from the waters of the River Lethe on their journey to the underworld, erasing all memories. “In its soft flowing the hard contours of the remembrance of reality are dissolved,” they are literally “liquidated,” as the literary scholar Harald Weinrich puts it. Only then are the souls ready for a new, eternal life in the afterlife. It is forgetting that allows for a fresh start.
In a sense, the same can be said of Schweizer’s work, where L’Étoile de mer and its initial dive into the Mediterranean mark the beginning of a new chapter. The location-bound, deep probing into the sediments of time finds itself paired with an artful, fluid, and lateral connection—a back-and-forth unfolding. The films that follow L’Étoile de mer—namely Voices and Shells (2020) and the aptly titled Sans histoire (2023)—carry forward and expand upon this engagement with water. But beyond the evolution of Schweizer’s own ouevre, L’Étoile de mer emerged at a broader turning point, where, amid the widespread reach of digital media, the ways we remember and forget—and our approaches to history and storytelling—are undergoing a profound shift.
This is particularly noticeable when comparing L’Étoile de mer with Sans histoire, the artist’s most recent film, which is explicitly concerned with ideas of the future. History, in the sense of something that can be told or even narrated, is much harder to discern here. Things seem to exist side by side, indistinguishable from one another; images detach themselves, seemingly contactless and uncoupled, to flow endlessly past. They are not without meaning, but perhaps without a single overarching one that would consolidate to shore them up. In other words, where the laterally connected, fluid narrative in L’Étoile de mer, with its tone and melancholic style, can still be interpreted as an emancipation from a more straightforward mode of narration—or, in topographical terms, as a departure from a fixed place—that gives it a specific contour, Sans histoire has moved away from such a framework, one that would provide contrast, form, and direction. In light of the images of the future that Sans histoire sketches—images that essentially depict a highly technologized digital present—the pictures in L’Étoile de mer appear even more like those of the past.
But, to return once again to Annie Ernaux’s opening line: Does this make all the images disappear? At the end of L’Étoile de mer, we see a starfish laboriously stretching and turning over. This is mirrored in the final sequence of Voices and Shells, where a snake sheds its skin. These are images of turning, of new beginnings, of metamorphosis and transformation. Yet, even when the starfish turns over, it looks nearly the same from above as it does from below. And even when the snake sheds its skin, nothing radically new or different emerges beneath the old skin—just simply a new one. Ultimately, it is not the images themselves that disappear. On the contrary, there are more images than ever, a veritable sea of them, a proverbial flood surging through digital channels. What does vanish—particularly in light of the fact that more and more images are made by machines, for machines—is a certain significance of those images, their meaning; it is history, in the sense of a time lived, experienced, and enlivened by humans. But even though the people of the long 20th century are gradually fading from the images, it doesn’t mean others won’t come to fill them again—newly and differently.
Maya Schweizer lives and works in Berlin. Her work has featured in solo exhibitions at Ortloff, Leipzig and Drawing Room, Hamburg (both 2024); the Jewish Museum Berlin (2023); Deutscher Künstlerbund e.V., Berlin (2023); Loop, Barcelona (2023); ASPN Leipzig (2022); Villa Stuck, Munich (2020); and al Spaziosiena, Siena, Italy (2019). She has also participated in group exhibitions including Dazugehören! Belonging! at Kunsthaus Dresden (2024); Nature. Sound. Memory at Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland (2023); the Basel Social Club (2023); Roma, a Portrait at Palazzo delle Esposizioni Museum, Rome (2023); Facing New Challenges at Heidelberger Kunstverein (2022); On the Quiet, Salzburger Kunstverein (2022), and Manifesta 13 in Marseille (2020), as well as Today’s Yesterday, 1.Anren, Biennale, China (2017), to name just a few examples from recent years. Her films have screened at festivals including the Forum Expanded section of the Berlinale International Film Festival in 2022 and 2017. The artist has received numerous awards and fellowships for her work, most recently the Günther Peill Foundation Prize, Düren (2024–26), the Dagesh Art Award (2023), and the HAP Grieshaber Prize awarded by VG Bild-Kunst (2022).
Ernaux’s line about the disappearance of all images is also found in L’Étoile de mer, a 2019 film by Maya Schweizer. But before that happens, the film plunges into the sea, into the Mediterranean near the small town of La Ciotat, close to Marseille, to be more precise. It begins underwater, floating amid fish in a vast array of colors and patterns. Despite glimpses of stones gently cloaked in green, it’s not entirely clear which way is up and which way is down. There is a weightlessness that leaves direction open. But quickly, in harsh, abrupt cuts, other images come into view—glowing animal eyes in the night, a hand holding a fossil to the camera, huge castoff turbines. Artificial and human-made, the latter take on the radial shape of the starfish whose name the film shares with a 1928 film by Man Ray.
The title is not the only direct reference to the foregone 20th century, its avant-gardes, and its guiding medium, cinema. Like fragments of memory, individual images, certain sentences, or sequences seem to emerge from the waters of the Mediterranean: the famous train filmed by the Lumière brothers in 1895/96 as it enters the station of that same town of La Ciotat in southern France—one of cinema’s primal scenes. Or various intertitles and images from Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961), a landmark film of European postwar cinema. “Do you remember?” asks a male voice from that film’s soundtrack, again and again, over images of the night, only to soon answer itself: “You have already forgotten everything.”
For nearly two decades, Schweizer has been exploring history, the passing of time, and the complex structure of memory in predominantly cinematic works. The quiet and moving piece Manou, La Seyne sur Mer (2011) finds the artist focusing on the life of her own grandmother in a nursing home and the latter’s increasingly fragmented perception of the world. In A Memorial, a Synagogue, a Bridge and a Church (2012), she explores, through long takes and a searching gaze, the monument to the demolished synagogue in Bratislava and its immediate urban surroundings, making palpable the simultaneity of different layers of time in one place. Her two-channel projection Regarde par ici, … Und dort die Puschkinallee (2018), centers on an old watchtower on the border between the former East and West Berlin. On the whole (though not always), these films follow a logic of site, more specifically, of a “site of memory,” a concept developed by the French historian Pierre Nora in the 1980s: place, symbolically charged with the past, becomes a fixed anchor in the unrelenting passage of time.
L’Étoile de mer is a film that contrasts the fixed (and fixing) site with the sea in all its fluidity, its inescapable, perpetual changeability and permeability—understanding water, its image, as a metaphor for forgetting. This oblivion is just as much a prerequisite for our relationship to time and the past as its counterpart, to memory, even if the latter is more readily linked to the concept of history and access to what came before. One could, to draw on cinematic terms, also put it like this: in the usual conception of history, forgetting is in a way the “hors-champ,” that which lies beyond the image itself: undefined and without fixed contours, an invisible yet nonetheless constitutive behind and around, against which the remembered appears as a defined and determined image. Memory: a piece of land to which one clings; forgetting: the water that sweeps one away—elusive, unplaceable, infinite, and never the same. Where the waves of forgetting seem inexorable, memory appears as an active resistance.
Water has been associated with forgetting since ancient times: in Greek mythology, the dead drink from the waters of the River Lethe on their journey to the underworld, erasing all memories. “In its soft flowing the hard contours of the remembrance of reality are dissolved,” they are literally “liquidated,” as the literary scholar Harald Weinrich puts it. Only then are the souls ready for a new, eternal life in the afterlife. It is forgetting that allows for a fresh start.
In a sense, the same can be said of Schweizer’s work, where L’Étoile de mer and its initial dive into the Mediterranean mark the beginning of a new chapter. The location-bound, deep probing into the sediments of time finds itself paired with an artful, fluid, and lateral connection—a back-and-forth unfolding. The films that follow L’Étoile de mer—namely Voices and Shells (2020) and the aptly titled Sans histoire (2023)—carry forward and expand upon this engagement with water. But beyond the evolution of Schweizer’s own ouevre, L’Étoile de mer emerged at a broader turning point, where, amid the widespread reach of digital media, the ways we remember and forget—and our approaches to history and storytelling—are undergoing a profound shift.
This is particularly noticeable when comparing L’Étoile de mer with Sans histoire, the artist’s most recent film, which is explicitly concerned with ideas of the future. History, in the sense of something that can be told or even narrated, is much harder to discern here. Things seem to exist side by side, indistinguishable from one another; images detach themselves, seemingly contactless and uncoupled, to flow endlessly past. They are not without meaning, but perhaps without a single overarching one that would consolidate to shore them up. In other words, where the laterally connected, fluid narrative in L’Étoile de mer, with its tone and melancholic style, can still be interpreted as an emancipation from a more straightforward mode of narration—or, in topographical terms, as a departure from a fixed place—that gives it a specific contour, Sans histoire has moved away from such a framework, one that would provide contrast, form, and direction. In light of the images of the future that Sans histoire sketches—images that essentially depict a highly technologized digital present—the pictures in L’Étoile de mer appear even more like those of the past.
But, to return once again to Annie Ernaux’s opening line: Does this make all the images disappear? At the end of L’Étoile de mer, we see a starfish laboriously stretching and turning over. This is mirrored in the final sequence of Voices and Shells, where a snake sheds its skin. These are images of turning, of new beginnings, of metamorphosis and transformation. Yet, even when the starfish turns over, it looks nearly the same from above as it does from below. And even when the snake sheds its skin, nothing radically new or different emerges beneath the old skin—just simply a new one. Ultimately, it is not the images themselves that disappear. On the contrary, there are more images than ever, a veritable sea of them, a proverbial flood surging through digital channels. What does vanish—particularly in light of the fact that more and more images are made by machines, for machines—is a certain significance of those images, their meaning; it is history, in the sense of a time lived, experienced, and enlivened by humans. But even though the people of the long 20th century are gradually fading from the images, it doesn’t mean others won’t come to fill them again—newly and differently.
Maya Schweizer lives and works in Berlin. Her work has featured in solo exhibitions at Ortloff, Leipzig and Drawing Room, Hamburg (both 2024); the Jewish Museum Berlin (2023); Deutscher Künstlerbund e.V., Berlin (2023); Loop, Barcelona (2023); ASPN Leipzig (2022); Villa Stuck, Munich (2020); and al Spaziosiena, Siena, Italy (2019). She has also participated in group exhibitions including Dazugehören! Belonging! at Kunsthaus Dresden (2024); Nature. Sound. Memory at Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland (2023); the Basel Social Club (2023); Roma, a Portrait at Palazzo delle Esposizioni Museum, Rome (2023); Facing New Challenges at Heidelberger Kunstverein (2022); On the Quiet, Salzburger Kunstverein (2022), and Manifesta 13 in Marseille (2020), as well as Today’s Yesterday, 1.Anren, Biennale, China (2017), to name just a few examples from recent years. Her films have screened at festivals including the Forum Expanded section of the Berlinale International Film Festival in 2022 and 2017. The artist has received numerous awards and fellowships for her work, most recently the Günther Peill Foundation Prize, Düren (2024–26), the Dagesh Art Award (2023), and the HAP Grieshaber Prize awarded by VG Bild-Kunst (2022).
Text Dominikus Müller
Translation Amy Patton
L’étoile de mer, 2019
HD Video, Color, Sound
11:00 min.
Courtesy the artist and VG Bild-Kunst
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Translation Amy Patton
L’étoile de mer, 2019
HD Video, Color, Sound
11:00 min.
Courtesy the artist and VG Bild-Kunst