Florence de Comarmond is a Franco-Mauritian artist born in Madagascar. This trajectory, rooted in spaces shaped by colonial history and displacement, very early on fostered a reflection on colonial legacies. She explores them through different media — photography, installation, drawing, and film — questioning notions of memory, exile, and representation, as well as the tensions between document and imagination.
In 2018, her work took a turn with Discourir du rêve au cœur du rêve, a collaborative project based on hypnosis and the shaping of dream experience. The work opens up a space where performances, paintings, and objects become the vectors of a shared imagination, reconfiguring the relationship between author, artwork, and experience.
At the end of the 1990s, she explored the transforming territory of La Plaine Saint-Denis, marked by deindustrialization and the emergence of new forms of collective life. From this experience emerged the photographic series La Plaine Saint-Denis (1997) and the installation Un autre pays, which investigate modes of occupation, circulation, and ritualization within these transforming spaces.
These works highlight the rituals of an African religious community settled in former industrial wastelands, while the installation proposes a metaphor for the inner territory invented by exiles and refugees, at the heart of new diasporas.
As a continuation of this research, in 1999 she was invited to write two texts for Des territoires en revue — “La voix, les ancêtres” and “La faim, la souillure” — which extend this reflection on contemporary territories and their representations.
The body of work was presented in the exhibition Des territoires (curated by Jean-François Chevrier, Paris, 2001), before the National Fund for Contemporary Art acquired the La Plaine Saint-Denis series in 2002.
In 2003, to question our postcolonial relationship to exoticism, she explored the former building of the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, before its transformation into the Cité de l’Immigration. There she produced the photographic series Salons Ovales (MAAO, Paris, 2002), in the former rooms of the exhibition commissioners and in the tropical aquarium, where she photographed two children of immigrant backgrounds.
The images — frescoes and maps projected onto the bodies of dancers — later became the material for the experimental films Exotic-dance and Aquarium Tropical (2006).
From 2004 onwards, she began a collaboration with historian Sophie Wahnich, resulting in several projects combining text and image. From this exchange emerged a publication based on her series addressing colonial memory, followed by the film Démocratie ?, selected for the Marseille International Documentary Film Festival.
The film unfolds both as an interrogation of the tensions contained within the very word “democracy” and as a visual meditation on urban space — between labour gestures, figures of children, and carnival scenes.
Among those interviewed, the perspective of an African student on his condition as a foreigner in French society creates a sense of unease: it displaces certainties and calls into question the very foundations of the democratic experience.
In 2018, a dream recounted by a friend marked a turning point in her practice. In this dream — which she considers a true “found object” — her friend visits an imaginary exhibition by the artist.
From this experience, Florence de Comarmond developed the collaborative project Discourir du rêve au cœur du rêve. She invited several close collaborators to undergo a hypnotic experience inspired by this dream, in an environment composed of her recent paintings depicting workers at work.
Eight participants took part in this filmed performance, including writer Pierre Guyotat, a few months before his passing.
The aim no longer lies in the artefact or in the artwork as an object meant to transform the world, but in the activation of imagination. This suspends the work-in-becoming and opens a space grounded in relation to the other, within the intimacy of the studio.
Discourir du rêve au cœur du rêve is conceived as an open process unfolding in a form close to the Möbius strip: without inside or outside, without a fixed point of origin. It opens up the possibility of a practice that partially escapes the artist’s control, through the multiplication of authors and the shifting boundaries of the work itself.