Emmanuelle Michaux is a French-Swiss artist working between Paris and Geneva. Trained in experimental cinema, she has developed a cross-disciplinary practice that weaves together video, installation, painting, and text-based objects. Her work, positioned at the intersection of the intimate and the poetic, is grounded in an exploration of memory, temporality, and the mechanisms of the archive.
At the core of her practice, Michaux engages with a singular corpus of amateur films gathered by her father. These anonymous, often silent images become the starting point for a process of reinterpretation and material reactivation. Through gestures of reappropriation, she restores presence to these forgotten faces, questioning their status and their afterlives within a society saturated with images.
Her videos, paintings, installations, and photographs form a coherent body of work marked by restraint and quiet emotion. They probe the nature of the recorded image—its power of survival, but also its inherent violence, bound to disappearance, mourning, and the erosion of the real. In this sense, cinema is no longer merely a medium but a material to be dismantled, exhausted, and pushed to its limits, in a fragile attempt to resist oblivion.
Influenced in part by Roland Barthes, Michaux uses a personal point of departure to open a broader, universal reflection on memory and loss. Through an aesthetics of spareness and erasure, her work stages a constant tension between narrative and silence, disappearance and persistence.
More recently, her practice has expanded toward a wider inquiry into our relationship to the living world—nature, ecological rhythms, and non-linear temporalities. In organic continuity with her earlier investigations into time and memory, Michaux explores the invisible connections between humans and their environments, the transformation of landscapes, and the ways in which nature itself might be understood as an archive, a site of resonance, and a space of repair.
Her work has been shown in a range of venues and festivals, including the 5th and 6th International Biennials of Film on Art at the Centre Pompidou, Le Fresnoy, artgenève, and various galleries in Geneva and Paris. Her theoretical writings have been published by L’Harmattan and the Action Artistique de la Ville de Paris. She has taught and lectured at the Sorbonne and HEAD–Geneva. Michaux is a graduate of Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains.