Elise Florenty

Élise Florenty, born 1978, is a graduate of the École Supérieure d'Art in Cergy, and did post-diploma courses at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon at Ensad (École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs).

Élise Florenty's videos describe an unstable terrain ruined by a juxtaposition of heterogeneous objects that struggle to coexist. Striving to regain their chaotic speech or to reinterpret facts with remote meanings, they accumulate different strata of reality that invoke memories both personal and collective.

Élise Florenty's project Kino Krov 2005, video (duration: 5'46'')

The project was inspired by The Man with a Shattered World, a book by the Russian neurologist Alexander Luria. One day, Luria persuaded one of his patients who was incapable of expressing himself in any other way to describe his trauma in writing. This he duly did in a volume titled I Take up the Fight. Based on this story, the film and installation explore a pathological relation to the world: everything is seen as being in ruins and under the threat of sudden, terrifying catastrophe.

Between autism and interior monologue, punctuated by obsessive gestures, a man, cluttered with outsize letters, busies himself writing the word KINO (cinema). His thoughts slip around associated sounds and puns: the letter K reminds him of another word, KROV (blood), and the letters K-R-O-V put in another order recall the middle of the word GOLOV-O-K-RJENIE (dizziness). Later, his story is accompanied by morbid hallucinations that give us a glimpse of real difficulties in his relation to domestic objects, to space and to his own body.

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Elise Florenty
L'Atelier du Jeu de Paume