Hélène Delean & Clément Caignart

Since 2016, Hélène Deléan and Clément Caignart have pursued a joint practice as Irma Name. Their work plays with forms of performance and video, combining theory and fiction, improvisation and co-creation.

Hélène Deléan studied at École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Sciences Po Paris and Akademija Likovnih in Sarajevo. Clément Caignart studied at École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and Cooper Union School in New York.

Their work has been shown at La Ferme du Buisson Centre d’Art Contemporain, Bétonsalon Centre d’Art et de Recherche, Centre Pompidou Paris, Parc St-Léger Centre d’Art Contemporain and Mountain School of Art in Los Angeles.

They made their first film, Rois d’Asile, in 2022 as part of the Nouveaux Commanditaires programme and in 2023 were awarded an ADAGP/Bétonsalon production grant.

N88DL is a speculative fiction that takes shape around the invention, by Momofuku Ando in Osaka in 1958, of instant noodles. An industrial symbol of modern Japan, this “one-person product” is typical of a society that prioritises optimisation and convenience. Instant noodles become the vector for a critical exploration that merges food anthropology with digital escapism and visual speculations. Inspired by Tatsuro Fujikura’s The Noodle Narratives and by spaghettification — the powerful stretching of objects near black holes —, Deléan and Caignart imagine noodles as altered artefacts, survivors of symbolic and social collapse. Like falling into cosmic soup. In an alternative reality, instant noodles are the relics of a world in which youth, absorbed by immersive universes, flee the expectations society forces on them. A distorted, unstable reality which, like a reflection in a bowl of soup, is endlessly recomposed.