Since 2001, Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet have been developing a unique approach, through the production of films, novels, radio programs and "didactic performances"€. The latter take the form of speeches during which they literally draw the audience into the twists and turns of the narrative, where science and fiction happily meet.The two young women are more particularly interested in historical characters relegated to the shadows, events that have been passed over in silence, works that are despised or have faded into oblivion. In terms of cinema they are more likely to unearth an outdated epic from the 1950s than one of the indisputable classics.
Their work could be seen as a restoration project. Like archaeologists, they reconstruct worlds by means of scattered fragments and entangled temporal strata in which Stendhal, chaos theory, and the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park  easily coexist. If caves, underpasses and tunnels are recurring settings in their story, this is surely because one must go underground before understanding what is happening on the surface.

Archives, museums, libraries, excavation sites and storerooms are at one and the same time their workshops and their formal models, where they find the spirit of their future work...

For the Synagogue de Delme, Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet have conceived a space that is a cross between a reading room and a museum storeroom. In the reading room located on the ground floor of the art centre, over the weeks visitors will discover a serialized novel written in the great tradition of the 19th century press. The novel will be published every Thursday in the local edition of the newspaper Républicain Lorrain, and will bring together historical figures such as Pythagorus, Louis Pasteur, Gilgamesh and Christine de Pizan. Visitors will be able to see the beginning of the novel at the exhibition opening, and then its ten episodes will be exhibited week after week in the reading room that has been created for the occasion.

The upper floor houses a storeroom specially assembled for the exhibition, consisting of artifacts borrowed from the Delme archeological collection, from the Musée départemental du Sel in Marsal, and from the Musée Barrois in Bar-le-Duc. Crystals, busts of historical figures, Merovingian buckle plates, fragments of Roman amphoras... represent the imaginative world of the text displayed on the ground floor. The central motif of the novel is "crystallization" a metaphor for the process of love, as elaborated by Stendhal in his book On Love, but also in the sense of the crystallization of ideas...

Marie Cozette