A multidisciplinary artist and enthusiastic figure of the spirit of creativity, Mark Blezinger travels between photography, theater and image-movement. The journey for him is plural and artistic as well as geographic and linguistic: that is to say, it is an existential one.

It startet the 28th of december 1962 in Baden-Baden, around 7pm, it seems.

He grew up in a magical landscape on the edge of Germany’s Black Forest alongside his ceramist mother, who transmitted to him a love of the wonders of nature and creation. With a passion for travel, he embarked on adventure at the age of 15, going to France to meet the Bread and Puppet Theater and the Théâtre du Soleil, troops with which he made his first appearance as a theater professional.

During summer vacations from school he set out to discover Europe until he started at the University of Paris 8 in Theater Studies. Very quickly he worked as assistant director, first in France in the Théâtre des Amandiers with Patrice Chéreau and then at the Schaubühne in Berlin. He assisted directors such as Luc Bondy, Klaus-Michael Grüber, Peter Stein, and Andrzej Wajda.

It was in Berlin before the fall of the wall, now a young father, that he presented his photographic work for the first time, in search of an expression of the emotions of the actors of the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz.
In 1989, the year of the fall of the wall, he returned to live in Paris, where he again collaborated with major directors such as Bob Wilson or Heiner Müller, and also created his first productions in Paris at the Théâtre de l'Odéon, at the Rond-Point Theater and the Avignon Festival. He then founded his own production company, Béla Compagnie.

This energy and these many experiences make him an organizer and a programmer of cultural events of the highest quality and international scope, with the Experimental Academy of Theaters for a period of six years and in particular with the Goethe Institute of Paris, for which he provided cultural programming for a season.

His passion for cinema led him to the techniques of image-movement and he launched into the creation of video for the theater and musical scene as well as the realization of documentary and fiction. This was done with Arte and the ZDF among others, where, faithful to the spirit of theater troupes, he played all the roles of actor, cameraman, editor, director, and scenographer.

True to his passion for travel, he brings together films for television and video creations for live performance in such varied places as South America, Europe, and Asia.
Always curious about new technologies like Alioscopy, which allows 3D vision without glasses, he further explores other visual and imaginary worlds. Since 2005 he has regularly exhibited these lenticular images and his photographic creations in European art fairs and galleries.

The filming of a portrait of the sculptor Giuliano Pedretti for retic television led him to discover the Engadine in the Swiss Alps. This mythical region became for him a new field of creativity. After exhibiting his explorations of the Alpine world in several Swiss galleries, he proposed to the Cultural Archives of the Upper Engadine to digitize their collections in order to transform them into works of art in the form of photographs, films and projections. A long collaboration thus ensued.
His first major multimedia exhibition Wunderkammer Engadin on the occasion of their 25th anniversary celebrated winning the recognition prize from the Swiss society for the protection of cultural property.

With Dora Lardelli, Director of Archives, he founded the AlpenMythenSehen program (SeeAlpineMyth). Since 2013 he has regularly created multimedia installations and projections onto buildings and other facades under under the aegis of AlpenMythenSehen around themes such as alpine herbaria, the Belle Epoque, witches, rock art, the painter Giovanni Segantini, to name a few, in many historic places and museums in the Alpine arc.

The traveling exhibition Laterna Magica. The Art of projection created in 2017 with the Cultural Archives in the attic of the Chesa Planta in Samedan was presented afterwards at the Musée Rétique de Chur and through January 2020 at the Théâtre de la Ville - Espace Cardin in Paris.

Lautrach Castle in Germany is presenting a large exhibition of works, notably photographic, from this cycle through May 2020.
 

"Mark Blezinger's creations come to life at the crossroads of the different artistic disciplines and the creative spaces in which he has evolved. Images and Stories are the key words: the works trace their belonging to the domain of figuration, an explosive figuration and disturbance, playing from all times, from all places and from all references, artistic and mythological, societal and cosmic. A figuration whose invisible presence also underlies the photographs of natural landscapes: full of this disturbing familiarity, these photographic works certainly reach the status of “landscape portraits” here. With regard to his work, the viewer can clearly experience this sensory journey that Mark Blezinger calls for: "... if by some miracle, these images could smell the earth or resonate what is hidden in us ...". A journey always in progress, experience always renewed, an enchanted round, perpetuum mobile…"

Gaëlle Maidon


Some dates:

1962: birth in Baden-Baden, Germany
1978: actor with the troupe of the Bread and Puppet Theater
1982: entrance to the University of Paris 8, studies of philosophie and theatre
1983: assistant director at the Théâtre des Amandiers, Nanterre
1985: joins the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin
1988: first photographic exhibition
1990: first staging
1991: programmer Experimental Academy of Theaters
1993: book published on the director Klaus-Michael Grüber
1995: foundation of Béla Compagnie
1997: first documentary film
1999: cultural program Goethe-Institut Paris
2003: first fiction film
2003: first video scenography
2004: first photographic montage
2005: first lenticular work with Alioscopy
2011: first 3D festival
2012: foundation of AlpenMythenSehen
2013: first mapping, first multimedia exhibition
2016: first installation in a museum
2018: first immersive and interactive space