About CAMERAMarcelline Delbecq’s Camera stitches itself together from a constellation of inquiries into photography as a practice of intuition and enigma. Delbecq interlaces works of film, photography, and writing to open a dialogue with herself, investigating photography’s impulse to reach outward. Camera forges an interplay between movement—the kind that lingers behind visual objects—and stillness, implicating a theory of the image as an interpretative, embodied act. With the fixity and power that looking at photographs enables, Camera builds an awareness, like that of Chris Marker’s distinction between Russian and American filmmakers, that unravels notions of “as above, so below.”

“Brushing against the limits of memory and knowledge in this marvelous meditation on photography and the machinery of observation, Delbecq invites us to contemplate the permutations on both sides of the lens.”—Erica Baum

“Like when chalk makes a circle: as clear as that.”—Jesse Ball

“A composite of earth and sky, Marcelline Delbecq’s Camera is a pocket-guide to places no one has been.”—Alexander Nemerov

MARCELLINE DELBECQ is a French visual artist, writer, scholar and occasional translator based in Paris. After studying photography in the United States (Columbia College, Chicago and ICP, New York, 1995-1997), Fine Arts and art theory in France, she progressively distanced herself from the practice of image-making to focus on the cinematic/photographic potential of writing through installations, recordings, live readings and publications. Her fragmentary texts — between essay and fiction, objectivity and subjectivity — generate mental images shifting from past to present and call the whole act of beholding into question.

Her work has been shown and performed internationally. She was in residency at Pavillon in Palais de Tokyo in 2005 and was the French resident at Triangle in Brooklyn in 2006-2007. She recently published in France Dialogue with Ellie Ga (Shelter Press, 2017), Oublier, voir (Fondation Cartier and Manuella éditions, 2015), Silence trompeur (Manuella éditions, 2015)and is a regular contributor to Trafic, (P.O.L), the quatterly on cinema founded by Serges Daney. Her essay Camera is published in English by Ugly Duckling Press, NYC.

JENA OSMAN’s books of poems include Motion Studies (Ugly Duckling Presse), Corporate Relations (Burning Deck), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press), The Network (Fence Books, National Poetry Series selection), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books) and The Character (Beacon Press, winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize). Osman was a 2006 Pew Fellow in the Arts, and has received grants for her poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Howard Foundation, and the Fund for Poetry. She co-founded and co-edited the literary magazineChain with Juliana Spahr from 1994-2005. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program at Temple University.

**This event was made possible by the generous support of the Cultural Services of the US French Embassy!**