As part of its first curatorial residency, Vidéographe is pleased to welcome within its walls the collective of projectionists Le Sémaphore for 2 months of exploration of our video collection from Vithèque.

Le Sémaphore proposes a revisiting of the first 10 years of Vidéographe’s collection—a period during which filmmakers experimented with new ways of producing images. The collective wants to build upon this history and its forms in order to better understand the rules and limits of the economy of representation today. This will involve considering potential ways of producing and disseminating images that don’t replicate the hegemony of privilege (of those who control the means of representation) and that don’t tie the images to identity politics.

Le Sémaphore would like to use this history as a point of departure to nourish our ‘common imagination’, to dream up futures radically different from those that have been prescribed to us—everyman for himself and the end of the world—and shake things up with an approach that doesn’t separate art and life. As a collective it proposes an exploration of the range of experimental forms produced during this lively period between 1971 and the early 1980s, when Vidéographe turned its focus to video as an artistic medium. During the selection process, the curators will not simply look at the images but also take into consideration the ways in which the films and videos were made and the communities that were formed. Le Sémaphore will try to look at the works the way that we look at the stars.

About the​ collective:
Le Sémaphore puts on night-time events off the beaten track: flashing images in peripheral spaces and on the outskirts of cities; street screenings, mobile experiments, minor or unknown works screened in abandoned spaces.