Melina Wilson

Somewhere between Geneva and Lausanne, you’re taking in the scenery. No need to shoot pictures – no one will enjoy it as much as you do now. You gradually realise that you’re walking from postcard to postcard, from film to film. The images become still while you’re in motion: aerial shots, tracking shots from a train, a car, a bicycle, a hand-held camera. Then there are the details: a close-up of the reflection in the water. Then a 180° rotation: a wide shot of the Jura.

JLG locations is a transdisciplinary research project by Boris Siemaszko and Melina Wilson based on Jean-Luc Godard’s corpus of films made along Lake Geneva. Unfolding through several mediums and by-products, it is an invitation to look at Godard’s work from a singular, site-specific perspective.

For further information: mail@melinawilson.ch

Le Montage vient en premier, 2023
Zabriskie Point, Geneva

Ciel contre Terre and Terre contre Ciel are a flow of images, blurred coordinates of strangely familiar landscapes, cinema organising the sequence of our memory and ordinary life reorganising it – not in reverse but otherwise –, the statement and the counter-statement, the quotation and its marks, the milestone and the outline.

“La Région du Léman: Lac et montagnes”, 2019
In: Octopus of Offshoots, Adriaan Van Leuven and Oliver Boulton (eds.), Werkplaats Typografie, Arnhem

“Our bodies can sometimes leave the cinema and find themselves simultaneously in the street and on the other side of the screen. The reel world. A bad pun and an accurate description of our wanderings between films and waymarked paths.” An essay about colliding scenes and landscapes, sense of direction and recurring patterns for Werkplaats Typografie’s summer reader.

“Lausanne–Geneva–Los Angeles. On reverse location scouting”, 2018
In: What life could be / The ambivalence of success, Rob Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma (Fucking Good Art, eds.) edition fink, Zurich

The contribution focusses on the progressive (yet discreet) implementation of Jean-Luc Godard’s film studio in Rolle, reviewing the causes leading to this decision as well as the consequences on his body of work – all while introducting our investigative methods.

The Story, 2017
Werkplaats Typografie, Arnhem. Available at WT shop and After 8 Books

A trip of failures between Maputo, Los Angeles and Geneva accounting for the power of repelling magnets. The publication includes a copy of Les Cahiers du cinéma nr. 300 with inserted pictures and footnotes as voice-over, a copy of the script of Godard’s unmade film The Story, and a postface added after having found some answers in King Lear (1984).

Vertigo, 2018
Performed lecture, Mediamatic, Amsterdam

“We call it the Coast. It stretches on half of the Swiss side of Lake Geneva, and provides first and foremost comfort and breathtaking beauty. We would just stroll around for years, investing in inflatable boats, finding hidden lakesides, trespassing on private property, unaware – or increasingly aware – that these shores hosted singular characters overtime, among which a film director.”

«These rumours of my non-existence are making it very difficult for me to obtain financing.», 2018
The Box, Arnhem

Conceived as both a waiting room and tourist office, the space served as context for a conversation with Prof. Roland-François Lack (University College London) about mapping films, reverse location scouting and outdoor cinema, while browsing tourism leaflets and postcards, contemplating the live-streamed shores of Lake Geneva, and waiting for a potential guided tour.

State of Play, 2017
Three-channel video-installation, End of the Year Show, Werkplaats Typografie

“Between Italy and Germany, between the woods and the water, I would try to locate another survivor who, according to the legend, specialised in visual media.”