The Absolute Mark

Landscape, borders, language, and mark-making beyond the limitations of territoriality and meaning.

In a 1917 essay, Walter Benjamin describes the nature of the mark as possessing a pre-linguistic essence that aligns with the mystical and the emergent. The “sphere of the mark,” writes Benjamin, “is that of a medium.” On a New York City-area beach during the Covid-19 pause, washed-up detritus appears to be assembled like hieroglyphs – a cryptic network of marks. Ecstatic inscriptions are encountered again in 2025 along the marked trail through the Pyrenees from France into Spain, along which Lisa Fittko, the underground resistance fighter, escorted Benjamin and other refugees escaping Nazi persecution.

16mm observational cinematography of abstract assemblages in border-territory landscapes are superimposed in-camera with animated marks like shadow impressions of asemic writing – inscriptions that defy legibility. Audio signal tuned to fragments, static, feedback, and ruin provide the aural counterpart to the visual mark that resists meaning and draws on Benjamin’s own involvement with radio from 1927 – 33 during which he wrote and performed some ninety-three radio pieces with no recordings of his voice surviving.