During the EMAP residency Fleur Melbourn will complete her ambitious video series Déjeuner nu which began in 2019 as her first video work produced with solely professional actors. The group play the roles of gendered archetypes: The Mother, The Whore, The Victim, The Writer, The Stud and The Judge. For Déjeuner nu Fleur is collaborating with the actors Marion Bottollier, Marie-Caroline Le Garrec, Marina Cappe, Xavier Delattre, Fabien Aissa Busetta, and Mattieu Rocher.

Déjeuner nu is a spoof soap opera involving multiple perspectives and no consensus. Hidden within the clichés of the daily soap are disguised a series of moral discussions about power. Episode by episode, six philosophical dialogues build upon one another, mapping the protagonists’ shifting relationships to gender, class and sexuality in an often satirical way.

In the plot, six friends reunite at a dinner party one night in Marseille, as the evening matures and alcohol and desire storm the room, power struggles turn each character’s account into an elaborate puzzle, in which fiction and reality blur. The series highlights everyday patriarchal and class warfare, using Kitchen sink realism as its starting point.

As the series develops it becomes unclear which stories are real and which exist solely in the character’s imaginations. All three couples live in this one block. Their social hierarchy and position within the group are ranked in ascending order from the ground up. The block is a parody of La Cité Radieuse, built as Corbusier’s vision for all, resided in by an elite.

Desire and rejection lurk around the plot, creating a smokescreen. As the episodes progress the series plays on the idea of language itself, eventually generating it’s own logic.

The videos are built from layering multiple takes with green screen, in real life and fiction, including smoke and tricks, that add to the feeling of a manipulated reality, taking place on an abstract timeline.

Language is at the centre of Fleur’s work. Through narrative, her videos discuss the gap between people’s experiences of the world, to what they are told is happening, inevitably prompting us to ask what we can do about how we perceive reality if it has been hijacked by structures of power.