While still an adolescent, and under the custody of the State, Jean Genet was placed in a learning center in Seine-et-Marne to train as a typographer. For a few weeks, Genet attended the typography course, before running away. Throughout his life, he would pay particular attention to the composition of his texts and to typography as a professional field. 

Bouchra Khalili´s film, a work built as an archive of memories, evokes Jean Genet´s relationship with typographical composition by recreating the phrase which serves as the epigraph in Un captif amoureux. The work highlights a process — a practice of archiving and the inscription of traces — of questioning the notion of branding and print, as well as the “composition” of image, understood as both a framing task, as well as text. It throws in the erasure of signs, images and words, but also the potentially liberating, even redeeming, gesture, of the very act of making art.