Marine Hugonnier

Marine Hugonnier’s work is a cinematic research in the field of politics of vision which reoccur in her work and constitutes its uniting thread. Her work moves transversally across feminism, gender fluidity, anticolonial and posthuman positions, challenging various problems of representation looking for a refiguration of the technologies of representation and another regime of images.

Although primarily a filmmaker, her practice includes photographs and works on paper. Her early films discuss the military gaze, the tourist gaze, the dominant gaze, the question of the author, the medium of film itself and finally journalism in the realm of aesthetic. Her most recent films despite differing in their inception and in their modes of production, research the possibility of representation of the non-human gaze, formulate a critic of heteronormativity and investigate the dismantling of structures of power. Her works are an attempt to deconstruct the inherent complicity between the gaze and political ideology and form a social critique of the gaze.

Hugonnier's filmic works also investigate the technicity and the materiality of film. They are an in-depth exploration of its mechanics. The fruitful tension between illusion and materiality and its experience constitutes the nucleus of her work and foregrounds an inquiry which articulates a dialectic between the observer and the observed.

Cinematography plays an important component of Hugonnier's work, as transforming the light reflected from objects into pictures involves mastering and understanding the implications, both technically and ideologically, of every component of film or image making. The questions of what is representable and unrepresentable, if representation ontologically always refers to colonisation, what meaning processes of image making have and how cinematography should be a reflection of this thinking, are at the core of her work. Thus, her unconditional engagement and dedication to film, cinéma and art outlines the profile of an artistic practice that understands filmmaking and art making as a transformative and seditious act.