This screening is proposed in the context of the collective exhibition The Four Cardinal Points are Three: South and North, curated by Amilcar Packer, presented at CRAC Alsace until March 26, 2023.

The film The Pearl Button (2015) appears in the exhibition through the Carta de Chile [Map of Chile], an artwork Emma Malig made for this film, on the invitation of Patricio Guzmán. 

On this occasion, Emma Malig will address her participation in two of Patricio Guzmán's films—The Pearl Button (2015) and Salvador Allende (2004)—, their friendship, and the making of the Carta de Chile, now presented at CRAC Alsace in Altkirch.

"In this film, the ocean contains the history of all humanity. The sea holds the voices of the Earth and those that come from outer space. Water receives impetus from the stars and transmits it to living creatures. Water, the longest border in Chile, also holds the secret of a mysterious button that was discovered in its seabed. Chile, with its 2,670 miles of coastline, the largest archipelago in the world, presents a supernatural landscape. In it are volcanoes, mountains and glaciers. In it are the voices of the Patagonian indigenous people, of the first English sailors and also those of its political prisoners. Some say that water has memory. This film shows that it also has a voice.

Emma Malig is a Chilean artist who was pushed to leave her country in 1983 by the context of the military dictatorship (1973–1990). She lives in France where she develops an artistic practice in which the materiality of geography and imagination are contiguous. Through the enactment of installations and objects, her research references Japanese traditions of paper and drawing as well as the poetic use of language, transparencies and light effects. Emma reminds us that “militancy can manifest itself in artistic ways,” that cartography can be an activity for the po-ethic unfolding of territories, that “deterritorialization is like a puzzle, like a land that has been transformed into small islands, where each inhabitant lives with their own landscapes and memory,” that the Spanish word for map, carta, also means letter, and that a map is therefore also a message. She tells us that “one has to invent one’s own places to be able to move ahead.”

The Pearl Button won the Silver Bear for Best Script and Ecumenical Award Berlinale 2015 and was nominated as Best Documentary at 2016 César Awards.