Marion Mounic

Born in 1992, Marion Mounic lives and works in Sète. As a visual artist, she explores the mobility and plasticity of the eye and spirit that she refers to as visual devices. She creates atmospheres enabling the creation of multisensory experiences. The visitor’s altered vision leads him to a place of an alternation between the hidden and the shown, where perception becomes ambivalent.

D’où vient, d’où vient-il
Que tu en aies

et les yeux

et les lèvres
et la couleur

et la chair de sapotille

dont la saveur en EXIL m’obsède tant.
Léon-Gontran damas – Pigments – névralgies (1972)

“Marion Mounic works with space, light, time and memory. Her installations that are always sculptural, trigger resistance towards oblivion and obscurity. Resistance is activated by physical and sensorial experiences.

The artist tracks different sources: one of her mother who is suffering from an eye illness, as well as that of her origins that are intimately linked to Morocco because of her father.

She went there for the first time in 2016, to see, feel and understand. She is attentive to the details of everyday life: behaviors, habits, and materials. It is then a question of retaining sensations: olive oil in the kitchen, pressure cookers, a neon sign, the sun in one’s eyes, the smell of dust. These elements take a plastic appearance.

Thus, the artist dips the Coran in an olive oil bath (Propre cuisine – 2018), she connects pressure cookers to electric engines, which, when placed on the floor, start a strange dance with different cadences (Samâ’ -2018). By extension, these artworks address the role of women, who are assigned to the domestic space, creating a territory of resistant words and gestures.

Marion Mounic’s practice is in fact based on a story about women. Several artworks like Chroma (2018), Angiographie (2018), Open (2018) ou Macula (2018) are sensorial experiences striving to emulate her mother’s eyesight.
Our bodies are put to the test of darkness, space, and light. Between disclosure and disappearance, the artist creates symbolic spaces in an attempt to materialize the unspeakable. Indeed, it is about embracing memory with the use of our body, to make us see it, feel it, touch it, hear it. Marion Mounic seeks the sources of her memory, her own, her family’s and by extension ours.

Her artworks express both a melancholy of powerlessness vis-à-vis of an inescapable disappearance and a vital impulse, a poetic eagerness to hold on to anything that escapes.”

“Aux Sources“, text by Julie Crenn