marylise vigneau
Your name
Marylise Vigneau
Place of birth
A bleak little town in France. But I did not stay more than one year.
Place where you live now
A little town near the former Iron curtain in Austria.
3 words to describe you
Seducible, adventurous, vulnerable
Why do you take pictures?
Photography is a way of going into the world, of deciphering and confronting it. Photography allows me to transmute my obsessive relationship with time, live other lives than my own, meet people, tell their stories, and transmit emotions through the evocative power of images.
Where do you get your inspiration?
From history, reminiscences and reality. I keep being surprised. There is nothing more imaginative
and ingenious than reality.
Who are your influences?
Novels influenced me more than anything else. I was a solitary child, and I used to eat books. Among photographers, I am influenced by Stanley Green, Claudine Doury, Aun Raza, Sally Man, Jason Eskenazi and Joseph Koudelka. I adore Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt. His images, filled with a rare emotion and a consistent sense of humour, allude, suggest, whisper, unearth the incongruous, and take us from amusement to a form of despondency, cruelty to tenderness, and vice versa.
What determines the subject matter you choose?
Intuition, curiosity, visual potential and chosen affinities. I like to get lost in a conflation of strangeness and desire. I am attracted by what I do not understand. I want to learn, guess and investigate.
What impact would you like your art to have?
I prefer allusions upon descriptions and want my images to be open to interpretation. I wish to propose some fleeting insight, raise questions, and inspire disobedience, resistance, curiosity or tenderness. Moreover, my work is an oeuvre of memory.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
The prose of Nabokov, the spirals of snails, the face of Nusch Éluard, and the slow pace of soviet trains to name a few.
Is there anything you want to add?
As the world as we know it is dissolving and shifting towards new mechanisms and unsettling landscapes, the tragic fate of Myanmar after the military coup of February 2021 has disappeared from the news. Therefore I am glad that this series is being featured.
And The Clouds Followed Them
Project statement
On February 1, 2021, in the midst of the European lockdown, news of a military coup in Myanmar hit the screens, bringing an abrupt end to what was once called a “democratic transition”. In a few days, the violence of the military dictatorship slaughtered what suddenly appeared to have been an illusion, massacring many hopes.
Documenting the present was impossible. Revisiting my Burmese archives of the past decade proved unsettling. The recent events had disfigured the past and the threats had become blinding. I then began to compose these diptychs in an attempt to understand.
These diptychs weave moments together, revealing shadows, telling the tale of that time.
What remains is the light, an emotion, a place, and the longing for happiness that define the human condition.
This series is dedicated to the people of Myanmar once again in darkness.
