Emmanuelle Michaux is a French-Swiss artist based between Paris and Geneva. Trained in experimental cinema, she has developed a multidisciplinary practice over the years, encompassing video, installation, painting, and text-based objects. Her work, situated at the crossroads of the intimate and the political, is rooted in a reflection on memory, time, and the mechanisms of the archive.
At the core of her approach is the exploration of a singular body of amateur films, collected by her father. These anonymous and often silent images serve as a starting point for a process of re-reading and recontextualization. Through acts of appropriation and transformation, the artist restores presence to these forgotten faces, questioning their status and destiny within a society saturated with images.
Her works – videos, paintings, installations, photographs – form a coherent body of art, imbued with poetry and restrained emotion. They examine the nature of recorded imagery, its power of survival, but also its inherent violence, linked to disappearance, mourning, and the erosion of reality. In this perspective, cinema is no longer merely a medium, but a material to be deconstructed and exhausted in a fragile attempt to resist oblivion.
Strongly inspired by the writings of Roland Barthes, Emmanuelle Michaux begins with a personal framework to open up a universal reflection on memory and loss. Through an aesthetic of minimalism and restraint, her work maintains a constant tension between narration, silence, erasure, and persistence.
More recently, her artistic research has evolved towards a broader inquiry into our relationship with nature, the living world, and the rhythms of the planet. In organic continuity with her reflections on time and memory, she now investigates the invisible connections between human beings and their environment, natural cycles, the transformation of landscapes, and non-linear temporalities. This new direction expands her practice into ecological, sensorial, and philosophical dimensions, where nature itself becomes a space of archive, resonance, and potential healing.
Her works have been displayed at various venues and festivals, at the 5th and 6th International Biennials of Art Films at the Georges Pompidou Centre, at Le Fresnoy National Studio for Contemporary Arts, at artgenève, and at galleries in Geneva and Paris. Her theoretical work has been published by L’Harmattan and by Action Artistique de la Ville de Paris. She has also given masterclasses and conferences at the Sorbonne, and at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD). She is a graduate of Le Fresnoy National Studio for Contemporary Arts.