With a shared sensibility towards the world and in their lives as artists, Flora Citroën and Kévin Blinderman chose to associate their practice during their residency in Lindre-Basse.

On the borders between sculpture and live concert, an archive-fiction concept or performance and the staging of ordinary objects, Kévin Blinderman develops an aesthetic that at first glance appears empty and disembodied, in which bodies are free to occupy the position corresponding to their emotional perception of the work in progress. At the heart of these almost living exhibition devices, the viewer occupies a position of retreat, caught between participation and analytical withdrawal, affective anaesthesia and emotional rush.

Flora Citroën’s work takes writing as its starting point, to construct fictions and sometimes auto-fictions, creative media mainly enabling her to give shape to her interest in calm or conflictual conversations, discussions, and oral exchanges – which she usually has with people, whether close friends or strangers. Her work takes the form of texts or exposés on paper, videos and so on, lending her creations an immaterial or even intangible presence, thus liberating themselves from the tyranny of objects.

The artists have in common the creation of artworks that give free rein to the expression of emotion, melancholy, and failure as an emancipatory value, running counter to a society that values – in a headlong rush – success, sure-fire happiness, and superficiality. They allow room for what is awkward and uncomfortable, not out of gratuitous provocation, but because these spaces of friction exist, are experienced by all on a daily basis, and therefore require artistic representation. The art of conversation, historical research, fiction writing (while playing on reality) sustains their practice and is based on a current tendency to construct fictive situations as an integral part of reality and vice versa.

In residence in Moselle, the artists wished to invest their Jewish origins to focus on the historical potential of the Synagogue de Delme and its community, now dispersed. Through an incomplete, mostly oral, and partially written story, the artists became improvised historians in order to express a story making the link between this Jewish history in Delme and their own. By making the synagogue a fictional character – the artists’ alter-ego, sharing a Jewish past and a present shaped by contemporary creation – they intend to draw on the many lacuna inherent to the history of the synagogue not as a constraint, but as so many interstices that they can enter into, to imagine connections and stories, inspired by reality to produce new fictions that might enlighten an as yet fragile history. Between personal quest and historical interest in a heritage site with a singular fate, Flora Citroën and Kévin Blinderman experiment together with new relationships with conversation, intimacy, and the aesthetic treatment of an emotional charge.

The artist residency programme is organised by the CAC - la synagogue de Delme in collaboration with the Lorraine Regional Natural Park and the village of Lindre-Basse.