Marie Sommer

Installation

Like a fragmented film, an investigation into several substances, documents unfold and question the augural character of the archive. A first film examines the archives of the Stasi – without captions, censored, annotated or numbered.
A systematic double of reality, these prospective images are archived to allow the possibility of looking at them tomorrow. For most of these files, the opening of which is annotated on the first page, I was the first person to write in a date, proving that the images had never been looked at. On another screen, in a space where these images are kept, the camera seems to slide between the archives, the files, the corridors and the offices in a time frame where emptiness is once again the master of its light, of its objects, of the signs of a muted, repressive activity that is both obsessive and paranoiac. At the same time, photosensitive surfaces randomly recorded the radiation of radioactive stones. The contact of the stones with the blank negative plates, lasting several months, created a trace like the one left by light. The total invisibility of these rays makes it impossible to anticipate the image that will be formed by the impact of the stone on the surface. Between these documents, a film without images unfolds a text by Bruce Bégout.

Marie Sommer

Trained at the school of photography in Arles, Marie Sommer has had residencies at the Centre Photographique d’Île-de-France and at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and was a pensionnaire at the Casa Velázquez in Madrid. In 2010 Éditions Filigranes published her book Teufelsberg, followed in 2020 by Une île. Her work has been exhibited, among others, at the Fondation Gulbenkian, Paris, the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, the Kyoto Art Center, and the CNA Luxembourg. Since 2018 she has been artist/researcher at Figura, a centre for research into the imaginary at the University of Quebec in Montreal, in partnership with Le Fresnoy. Her research bears mainly on sites that constitute archives of the cold war.

Production

Credits