L’étoile de mer
2019
HD video, 11”, colour, sound
“C’est une étoile qui tombe dans la Mer Méditerranée.” – (“It is a star that falls in the Mediterranean Sea”) it says in Man Ray’s film synopsis of L’Étoile de Mer (The Starfish) made in 1928.
L´Étoile de Mer by Maya Schweizer is an experimental navigation in the Mediterranean Sea, mingling underwater shots, silent movies, the 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.
Maya Schweizer
Maya Schweizer, born in Paris in 1976, studied art and art history in Aix-en-Provence, at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB) and at the University of the Arts (UdK) in Berlin. Schweizer works with different media, with a particular focus on experimental videos. In her films and sound works, she investigates the structures and processes of memory, exposing their narratives and identity-forming functions. In doing so, she always proceeds from a quasi-ethnological research on site. Her videos have been selected for numerous festivals and events, including the 67th Berlinale (2016), the Vancouver International Film Festival (2017, 2019) and the 52nd, 62nd, 65th and 66th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2006, 2016, 2019, 2020), where L’étoile de mer was awarded the e-flux prize in 2019. Schweizer works in Germany and France.