En Presence des Images | Writers' Series

The Evens Foundation in partnership with LE BAL invites writers to shed light on images that address the question of collective memory.

The project inaugurates a new collaboration with our long-standing partner and the acclaimed French institution, marking our continuous support for visual studies. We are launching a series of commissions of short literary texts to explore photographs exposing moments of our present or recent past. Familiar or forgotten, some of these images have shaped our vision of the world, others were left at the margins of official narratives.

Through writing the images unfold the often imperceptible at first sight historical, political, and cultural significations, revealing how our collective gaze is being conditioned, be it by cultural habits or technical possibilities, and how ways of seeing persist or change over time.

The invited authors are Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam, Bertrand Schefer, Arno Bertina, Kaoutar Harchi, Mathieu Larnaudie, Ryoko Sekiguchi, Oliver Rohe, Olivia Rosenthal, Tristan Garcia, Maylis de Kerangal and Helène Gaudy. The texts will be published both in the French daily Libération and on Ersilia, LE BAL's digital platform and tool for visual literacy. Initiated in partnership with the Evens Foundation, it has received acclaim from the educational community. En Presence des Images aims to enrich the platform with new literary content and to share Ersilia’s remarkable resources with wider audiences.

Read here the texts as they are published, every Saturday from October to December 2021.

The Evens Foundation in partnership with LE BAL invites writers to shed light on images that address the question of collective memory.

The project inaugurates a new collaboration with our long-standing partner and the acclaimed French institution, marking our continuous support for visual studies. We are launching a series of commissions of short literary texts to explore photographs exposing moments of our present or recent past. Familiar or forgotten, some of these images have shaped our vision of the world, others were left at the margins of official narratives.

Through writing the images unfold the often imperceptible at first sight historical, political, and cultural significations, revealing how our collective gaze is being conditioned, be it by cultural habits or technical possibilities, and how ways of seeing persist or change over time.

The invited authors are Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam, Bertrand Schefer, Arno Bertina, Kaoutar Harchi, Mathieu Larnaudie, Ryoko Sekiguchi, Oliver Rohe, Olivia Rosenthal, Tristan Garcia, Maylis de Kerangal and Helène Gaudy. The texts will be published both in the French daily Libération and on Ersilia, LE BAL's digital platform and tool for visual literacy. Initiated in partnership with the Evens Foundation, it has received acclaim from the educational community. En Presence des Images aims to enrich the platform with new literary content and to share Ersilia’s remarkable resources with wider audiences.

Read here the texts as they are published, every Saturday from October to December 2021.