An original installation by Hélène Delprat based on the film work Nicole Stéphane, A Displaced Person, mounted in 2018.

“Nicole Stéphane was born Nicole de Rothschild in 1924. She was an actress, director and producer, but here I’ve chosen to focus more on her fighting, rebellious and resistant nature. “She ran away to Portugal at the age of 16 because she wanted to be a photographer, then joined the army in England, the war, the landings, the interview with Ben Gourion at the creation of the State of Israel. Always the passion, always the courage. War, wars. Never fear. Then she began producing: from Rossif to Franju, whose assistant she was, from Marguerite Duras to Susan Sontag. Her major project was Luchino Visconti’s impossible adaptation of La recherche du temps perdu.

Her last film was shot in Sarajevo during the war, while Susan Sontag staged En attendant Godot in Sarajevo. Here, then, is a portrait of a displaced person, as she liked to define herself.
H.D

2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Nicole de Rotschild, the 160th anniversary of the birth of Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild and the 90th anniversary of the bequest of the Villa and its collections to the Académie des Beaux-arts in 1934.

For the past four decades, Delprat’s polymorphous practice has questioned the human condition, life and death through a body of work in multiple media and “what she doesn’t know how to do”: video, theater, installation, real or fictitious interviews and radio creations. Her practice, nourished by an encyclopedic logic, compiles archives from heterogeneous sources. Her works, a sort of gritty book of hours or “encyclopedia of disorder”, form a sprawling constellation of references to literature, cinema, radio, philosophy, Internet databases, archived narratives and art history. She works on notions of recording, memory and identity, transmuted by an infinite curiosity, and creates a Museum of Titles. She tries to save herself from herself, she says, to get away from herself, and speaks of the Renaissance concept of Serio Ludere (to play seriously).
She likes to quote Fischli & Weiss, Joan Jonas, Mike Kelly, Paul Mac Carthy, Barnett Newma or Pierre Huygue… She photographs herself and, in her studio, creates solo moments of “experimentation with the body under influence”.

Her films are sometimes theatrical, combining economy of means and excessive effects, sometimes completely serious portraits, sometimes homages to B or Z films, or montages of film archives. They form a body of work in which strangeness and reality intermingle. She does “her thing”, i.e. what she has to do, without giving any answers to ethological questions as she transforms.