Three people find safeplace from their common loneliness in the relationships they establish with technological objects. These objects gradually substitute the human partners by alleviating their need for interaction and tenderness.

After exploring various sociological phenomena that put the female body to the test in the digital age (cam girls, love dolls, female influencers), Marilou Poncin is pursuing her investigations into the evolution of our fantasies as mediated by technological tools.

Her installation Liquid Love is Full of Ghosts is inspired by speculative design: through fiction, the artist imagines plausible technological objects. These, unlike the love dolls, are non anthropomorphic, yet individuals can forge an emotional and sensory relationship with them.

The title alludes to Zygmunt Bauman’s book Liquid Love. The sociologist analyzes the changes affecting the individual in a society where the bonds between people have dissolved because of a constant fear of rejection. The «palliative» objects in the installation fill the anxiety of solitude as much as they fill a void.

In this rather dark universe, the bluish lights of the connected objects are the common signal of this physical, flesh and synthetic relationship.

AUDREY ILLOUZ

Launched in 2015 after receiving the Inrocks Lab award (new video creation), her work was subsequently exhibited at Espace Témoin (Geneva), Frac Île-de-France, La Villette, Les Magasins Généraux, La Gaîté Lyrique, and at festivals such as the Créteil International Women’s Film Festival and Videoformes in Clermont-Ferrand. More recently, she designed a multimedia installa- tion for CAC Passerelle Brest and a photo series exhibited at the Ricoh Art Gallery in Tokyo, curated by Pascal Beausse.

In 2022, she was shortlisted for the Sam Prize for Contemporary Art and was invited by MAC Lyon for her first solo museum exhibition. Supported by the Fondation des Artistes, she created a new multimedia installation titled Liquid Love is Full of Ghosts, currently presented at the Discovery Award of the Rencontres d’Arles Photography Festival 2024.