Marcella Lista: seeing, hearing

“One can look at seeing but one can’t hear hearing,” observed Marcel Duchamp. Sergei Eisenstein was fascinated with Walt Disney’s virtuoso image-sound synchronization, considering it as a paradigm of a ‘plasmatic’ ideal of modernity, that of a fluid continuity between hearing and seeing. Most of the avant-garde cinema has attempted to explore this contradiction between the physiological gap and the technological unison. through a selection of works by the masters of animation and abstract film, this lecture and screening session looks into the way the audiovisual arts developed in the 20th century have tried to mix up and trouble the various properties of perception, resulting in expanded experiences of both distance and proximity.

Marcella Lista is an art historian based in Paris and chief curator of the new-media collection at the centre Pompidou. Her research work deals with the trans-disciplinary aspects of the history of modernity, in particular with questions related to the archaeology of media and performance arts, leading to extended theories of abstraction. Her critical work in contemporary art is engaged in various topics, from conceptual dance and performance through post-photographic practices. She has curated various exhibitions, namely sons & lumières: une histoire du son dans l’art du xxe siècle (centre Pompidou, 2004), corps étrangers: danse, dessin, film (musée du Louvre, 2006); Pierre Boulez. œuvre : fragment (musée du Louvre, 2008), Paul Klee: polyphonies (musée de la musique, Paris, 2011), Walid Raad/preface to the first edition (musée du Louvre, 2013), mark Lewis. Invention at the Louvre (musée du Louvre, 2014). As a curator at the Louvre museum from 2005 through 2015, she has also curated openings, an international program of music and art performances. Among her recent publications: Xavier le Roy: ‘a discipline of the unknown’, Afterall, London, n°33, summer 2013; play dead: dance, museums and the “time-based arts”, dance research journal, Cambridge, n°46/3, December 2014.