Take a look at our previous spotlight: Marseille-based artist Emma Tholot and Paris-based curator Mathilde Badie.
Emma Tholot’s artistic practice consists of installation work combining video, photography, textile, wax, and metal. Her materials, images, and objects act as mediators between an emotional grounding and its collective staging ; as revelators of the tension between a vocabulary of intimacy and a system of ritual ostentation.
From costumes to ex voto, through references to theater, carnival, circus and their archetypal figures, everything points toward the baroque idea of a display of affects that undermines the established order. Here and there, the heaviness of velvet and the satin sheen catch or reflect the light. Through layering, textile thresholds harbor a potential for revelation. Emma Tholot highlights the inherent duality of ornament and spectacular display : performance often relies on illusion, on the chimerical.
Her works draw on circulations, at times geographical - those of our itinerant stories ; at times existential - those of the subtle bonds linking sky and earth. These movements are also those of the porosity between the popular and the poetic, the everyday and fiction, domestic gestures and universal narratives. In her installations, every arranged material carries a symbolic density. The gleam of a metal amulet evokes fortune, a white fabric recalls rites of passage, a house materializes a wish for anchoring.
Quite often, the realm of the intangible asserts itself as the counterpart to these plastic elements. Emma Tholot multiplies systems of apparitions : if ghosts and veiled figures punctuate her images, the underlying, hidden within the folds, also reveals itself through technique. Her photographic sublimations or transfers on wax speak of the spectral dimension of the image. If, in her work, layers act as a screen, it is to better invite us to discern within them the mechanisms of belief that we construct, and that, in turn, inhabit us.
