Liquid Love is Full of Ghosts, Marilou Poncin’s exhibition, was one the sensations of last summer’s Rencontres d’Arles, the world’s foremost photography festival. The artist imagines the quasi carnal relationship of individuals with objects, like a man with his highly polished car. We met Marilou on the occasion of the publication of her beautiful book presenting her various projects to date by Collapsebooks.
How did you become an artist ? Do you come from a family of artists?
Marilou Poncin I don’t come from an artistic family at all. I was raised by my mother who was an assistant. And I grew up in a very isolated place in central France, in the Aveyron region. Art came to me in a rather strange way. I did not have any role models, I did not go to museums. I grew up in the countryside and I did not have any exposure to culture. Art came to me, I think, because I spent a lot of time by myself in the mountains. It developed my imagination during my childhood. It made me want to tell stories. I also watched a lot of films on television. My mother would also tape films on VHS tapes. All this nurtured my imagination. And as I was not really fitting in the traditional education system, little by little I started searching for another system. That’s how, starting in high school, I chose to be in an art program with 20 hours each week dedicated to design, art, etc. The next step was going to the Beaux-Arts in Lyon when I turned 18 and then the Arts Décoratifs, in Paris.
What were your biggest influences as an artist, inside or outside the art world?
Marilou Poncin Coming from a milieu which was not artistic at all has helped me make no distinction between the kinds of influences. I define myself today more as working in fine arts, but I started by doing photography and video when I was a teenager. I gradually and more recently came to ceramics and painting. So there’s a melting pot of influences : popular culture with which I grew up, pop culture - TV stars, reality TV, Lolitas, teen movies. All this blended with artistic references I encountered when I studied at the Beaux-arts, like the work of Pipilotti Rist who has been a big influence on my work. Also Jonathan Glazer, David Cronenberg’s work, of course, and lots of photographers. It’s all these very diverse influences that have inspired my work and have shaped the aesthetics of my work.
You are young - 32 years old - and you have had important shows at the Arles photo festival or at the Lyon Museum of Art. How would you describe your path as an artist? It seems to have been relatively easy.
Marilou Poncin It’s been quite fluid and natural. At first, arriving at the Beaux-arts, coming from a rural community, was a shock. All the media I am using, it’s like a dance of possibilities and I choose the one which is best adapted to the story I want to tell. My projects often require a lot of research. For instance, for the Japan love dolls project, which is a social phenomenon, I read social science books to understand the topic. Then, that research is transformed into art and that’s when I choose what is the most appropriate medium - photo, video, painting, ceramics or even bigger installations. It’s always been fluid. It’s part of the process of being a young woman who’s growing up.
What is interesting, is that, whatever the project, you use what will serve your project. You’re not limiting yourself.
Marilou Poncin Yes, it’s something that came to me very naturally even though it’s not something that you are encouraged to do when you study at the Beaux-arts because to be an artist that gets known you need to do work that is recognizable. That’s why artists usually choose a medium and stick to it. I did not think this way. There’s pleasure in doing and in learning new techniques. So, instead of limiting myself to one medium, on the advice of one professor, I decided I would not limit myself, that it was a way for the richness of the work to be expressed. I think the new generation of artists is also thinking this way. There is freedom in this way of approaching the work.
How would you explain your work ? Also, how did you become interested, as an artist, in exploring the new femininity?
Marilou Poncin It’s not easy to describe one’s work. My work requires the body of the viewer to be present. It’s difficult to describe this type of experience. It’s hard to explain…
Let me help you. I think your work deals with the new codes of femininity, with the liberation from the traditional codes of beauty or “good taste”; there’s an absence of judgment. I see a lot of empathy in your work… You celebrate the fact that some of the women your work is about are indifferent to the judgment we might cast on them. You also talk about “Instagram beauty”.
Marilou Poncin My work is first of all connected to fantasy, the way we imagine the world. Fantasy can be very liberating or alienating. All my projects deal with these fantasies, with fantasmagoria. And the body of women is part of this fantasmagoria. I grew up with images of Paris Hilton, these perfect bodies of young women we wanted to look like. The codes of beauty were very powerful. I think my work is about deconstructing and understanding these women who are objects of desire. My work usually has 2 aspects: at first, I take a bias, a preconceived idea about these women - bimbos, ultra feminine characters, or individuals on the margins with a sexuality which one could consider as weird, and I invert the stereotype to show all its facets. I make these people more human. Or I accentuate their characteristics so that my work ends up deflating the archetype. And through these archetypes, viewers can free themselves because we all are living under the same expectations, the same social pressure to succeed which leads to all kinds of deviations. We cast people in the margins of society as they’re reacting to the demands of society in a way that is not considered “noble”. What is considered vulgar is part of what is not considered acceptable.
Which is what you showed in 2024 Arles’ Rencontres Photographiques…
Marilou Poncin Yes, people who have relationships with objects - a car, for instance - rather than with humans. This is what I believe defines my work. It allows me to highlight a figure or another and to analyze what it is we find disturbing in them.
Your work shows a lot of empathy towards these individuals in the margins and unacceptable behaviors, but at the same time you criticize the society where these people operate.
Marilou Poncin Yes ! I am just an observer. I am often asked what it is that I criticize, and what my message is. But I don’t necessarily have the answer to that question. My role is mostly, I feel, to ask questions, or to have us face symptoms of our society.
Your work is also a celebration of freedom. Your characters seem to say “This is who I am and that’s my freedom.” It requires a lot of courage to be oneself.
Marilou Poncin Yes ! There is this idea of empowerment. I want to show both the person’s vulnerability and their empowerment. It’s like with the word “queer”, there’s the idea of pointing the finger at a group and at the same time it becomes something around which this group creates a community. There’s a shift.
In your work, there’s also the idea of what is real and what is fake. You show the young women in the sort of OnlyFans site and how they transform themselves for this role.
Marilou Poncin What is real and what is fake is a very interesting question in our world today as it’s become harder and harder to distinguish one from the other, whether it’s fake news, images, A.I. I find that the more artificial the world becomes, the more what’s authentic is rare and therefore has more value. It’s almost something which has monetary value. That’s what cam girls clients are looking for. Pornography would seem too artificial to them. They’re willing to pay to have a relationship - even through a video screen - with someone who’s authentic. As a young woman, I see how difficult it is to be both oneself and to conform to the image that people are sending through social media platforms. I am OK because I like to have several personalities, but when you’re not embracing this plurality of identities, it can be unsettling, schizophrenic.
Your work, I feel, is about solitude, loneliness, like your piece of the man with his car. Do you believe objects have replaced humans?
Marilou Poncin. I don’t see it this way. I find it frightening. I think, rather, that machines, objects, are crutches. When someone is hurt or lacks self assurance, when they’re missing something, the object is there to help. It is not a substitute. It is something that helps at a moment in a life. We will never be able to completely replace humans. There are studies showing that if a baby, in the first months of his life, is deprived of contact with humans, they die.
You have been accumulating, storing thousands of images over the years. Are you using AI and what place does it have in your work?
Marilou Poncin AI could be interesting to create categories of images, for instance. But I have used AI twice in installations - at Lyon’s Musée d’Art Contemporain for the piece with the women divers which were pasted on the muséeum’s entrance doors. These are AI created images of women bathing in swimming pools. They were echoing images of young women using all kinds of artifices to modify their body. Despite the artificial feel of these images, these were real women. I wanted to have this feeling that the real images were fake and the fake ones real. I found this inversion interesting. I also used AI during the Artorama art fair in Marseille. I had a solo show in my gallery’s booth and for that I created a fake Marseille evening sky which was bathing my images in this light so typical of the light of the South of France difficult to capture. So far, I have only used AI for parts of the scenography. It creates a dialogue between the pieces and the scenography.
At the other end of the spectrum, you’re using ceramic in a very original, even disturbing way, sometimes, with those strange shapes. How did you become interested in this medium?
Marilou Poncin I started working with ceramic 2 or 3 years ago. It’s fairly recent. Until now, I was not really doing any kind of sculpture. Especially in art school, I did not have a great experience working with wood and metal specifically because there was something harsh, alien to the body, inorganic. It scared me. Once you have sculpted a piece of wood, you can never put it back ! I felt there was something unnatural. I had been wanting to try ceramic for a long time. I did not know anything about it. I just took a course for a year. That’s how I started this work on ceramic connected to images. I wanted to move away from 2 dimensional representations. Thanks to this experience, I discovered I did not have an aversion for sculpture, but rather that I felt more at ease with “soft” materials which are closer to the body. Ceramic with its character is very organic, instinctual and feels like my own body. It was also more connected to nature in which I grew up. Maybe I was unconsciously rejecting it for years to be my own person. We all do this at a certain time. Ceramic was a way to reintroduce nature in my work. It also has a cartoon feel because the shapes are distorted, one feels traces of the fingers. The shapes sometimes look like organs or like shells.
Do you do a lot of research to prepare for your projects, in particular when you’re working on universes like the cam girls, for example ?
Marilou Poncin Yes, I do a huge amount of research online. I am already starting to do interviews for my new project. There is also my own personal memories. So, it’s a blend which ends up creating these fictitious characters - a little bit of me, a little bit of others. It’s like digesting. I accumulate information for a long time and after a while I can regurgitate the character. It’s as if I have all this information in my head and the character is ready to come out. The 11 minute monologue of one of the cam girls I wrote in one single evening after months of research.
Is your work evolving in a particular direction now ?
Marilou Poncin It’s more of a continuation. As I work on films, it takes years to make. The film shown at the Arles festival took 3 years to make. Right now, I have two film projects ready to start the development phase. I am working on “reborn babies”. It is about dolls similar to the Japanese love dolls, but these dolls are babies. The women who own them take care of them as if they were real children. That’s the continuation of the love doll project and the idea of the fake partner. I am also preparing a film project that I wrote last year. And I am working on my ceramic work. I started showing them only recently. It’s very pleasurable. I am developing this part of my work. I am also doing a lot of research on the representation of femininity in the Renaissance period. I feel it’s a moment in the history of representation of the women’s body that is very important and it’s still present today, like the eroticization of the female body which traveled through time.
~Jean-Sébastien Stehli
Bodies of Work, Marilou Poncin. 220 pages. English & French. Collapse Books
