Paul Heintz

Paul Heintz

was born in Saint-Avold in 1989, and is a graduate of Beaux-Arts de Nancy, Arts Décoratifs de Paris and Le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains. He lives and works between Paris and Lorraine. His work in object, sound, film and installation has been presented at contemporary art events and film festivals such as FID Marseille, IFFR Rotterdam, Paris Nuit Blanche and Circulation(s). He is the winner of the Emerige Revelation Award 2019 and Revelation Livre d’Artiste 2021.
Paul Heintz’s field of action is a strange collection of cases where reality is largely impregnated with fiction, and where social normativity at the same time weighs heavily. Imagination and fiction have their own toxicity when they combine their pleasure with social norms, as is the case with storytelling, for example. From there, Paul Heintz enters into the logic of fiction, takes it further, and through this extension brings in a saving draught.

“Obstructionism is a term theorized by the militant journalist Emile Pouget in the early 20th century. He takes as his starting point the Obstruction of the Italian railway workers: the “Ferrovieri”. He describes in detail how, during the 1905 railroad strikes in Italy, the railwaymen kept working while slowing down their tasks to the extreme to show their opposition.
During my residency at Villa Medici, I will use these accounts and archives from the time of the “Ferrovieri” Obstruction to develop an artistic work between documentation, performance and cinema.”