FLORE
"Maroc, un temps suspendu" & "L’odeur de la nuit était celle du jasmin"

Exhibition: 6 November 2021 – 18 January 2022

In FLORE’s work, memory acquires a unique temporality, oscillating between reminiscence and becoming. It describes the disturbing moment which intertwine that which has been lived with what might happen.

The exhibition provides an encounter between the two series "Maroc, un temps suspendu" and "L’odeur de la nuit était celle du jasmin" which, each in their own way, describe how we live memories.

"The Time of Memory" is long, heartbreaking and tender, from which the artist retrieves moments of such fragile grace that one wishes to dwell in them.

FLORE’s work is haunted by memory, a tentative reconstruction of a childhood lost, while also creating a time of becoming through an imagination that is unceasingly reborn, like a thread between Indochina and Morocco.

Breaking beyond the bounds of the photographic medium, FLORE’s works manifest a particularly rich exploration of plasticity. In their composition, the series also resemble memories. Heliogravures, pigment prints of Polaroids, silver gelatine prints, marouflage on gold: each series proceeds by integrating and recomposing representations of fleeting moments which, in spite of their diversity, tell a coherent story. Memory is restored in a dialogue between photography and painting.

"L’odeur de la nuit était celle du jasmin" sketches the contours of a mythologized Indochina from the stories of FLORE’s ancestors. The series’ landscapes are suspended, in waiting. The chairs the pontoon are empty. The steps of the colonial mansions lie untrodden as vegetation gradually crawls up the facades and across closed shutters. Yet, these places seem to mirror those who are absent. The Indochina FLORE reveals to us seems so familiar to the place lived and put into words by Marguerite Duras that we can almost feel common memories crumble in the evening dampness. Like Duras’ texts, FLORE’s photographs are saturated with possible absences, that they contain and enclose until they rip open.

"Maroc, un temps suspendu" revives places of the photographer’s own Moroccan childhood, through images that bring the hum of honey-colored days to life.

An intimate geography lies at the heart of this series, where FLORE’s autobiographical story merges with Morocco’s immortal landscapes, capturing a preciously imperishable image.

In the presence of absence that drifts through these photographs, FLORE’s work seems to capture and manifest a completeness, where the present is reconciled with the past, and life reconciled with death.