Fisheye Magazine – ‘Les coups de coeur — Marina Viguier et Emma Tholot’
Profane – n°19 ‘Amulettes amies’, 2024
ACV Magazine – Issue 02 ‘Carmela’, 2023
Beaux Arts Magazine – ‘Nos plus belles découvertes 2023’, 2023
Time Out Paris – ‘4 expositions qui convoquent fantômes et esprits’, 2023
67e Salon de Montrouge – exhibition catalogue, 2023
MadeInBedMagazine – ‘C. Eugène en conversation avec l’artiste E. Tholot’, 2023
Manifesto XXI – ‘Une jeunesse qui nous tient en éveil’, 2022
Les Presses du Réel – ‘Bureau d’investigation du sacré’, 2022
Nouveau Grand Tour – residents catalogue, 2022
100% L’EXPO – exhibition catalogue, 2022
9 Lives Magazine – ‘100% l’EXPO, 100% gagnant’, 2022
En revenant de l’expo – ‘La Relève 4, Veiller’, 2022
Hypothèses – ‘Quelques réalisations vidéo (…)’, 2020
ENSAD – graduation catalogue, 2020
Bibliothèque de l’ENSAD – Master’s thesis ‘Actes de se tenir, de se vêtir, de se nourrir – et de désirer, en Italie du Sud’, 2019

‘Lulled by the supernatural and superstitious stories her Spanish, fortune-teller grandmother used to tell her, Emma Tholot has built a world of fantasy full of magicians, mermaids, ghosts, and divine children. These archetypal figures are the protagonists of a body of stories that she stages in protean installations. While photography and video are her preferred means of artistic exploration, her visual vocabulary is enriched by collages, sculptures and works on fabric which unfold in theatrically-inspired scenographic devices.

Her passion for oral traditions and popular culture has led her to explore and question the persistence of rituals in our contemporary world. She is particularly interested in the dances performed on the shores of the Mediterranean, and especially in Ibiza (her homeland).

With her analogue camera, Emma Tholot examines costumes, jewellery, hairstyles, and embroidery with the acuity of an ethnographer and the sensitivity of a visual artist. From this almost documentary collection, the artist imagines intimate, touching narratives that border on myth. In the Carmela series (2022–ongoing), for example, the artist portrays her grandmother’s nanny, who escaped a forced marriage thanks to wax wings… With finesse and poetry, the artist probes the ambivalent nature of these ancestral rituals, revealing the other side of these folkloric ceremonies, which perpetuate a patriarchal vision of society. The beauty of the jewellery and costumes must not mask the hierarchy of the sexes, as illustrated by the choreography in which young men “gallop” around the young women to be conquered. At once a family legend and tale of emancipation, Carmela takes the form of an installation bringing together a wide variety of media echoing one another. There are close-up photographs of hands covered in gold and silver rings, staged photographs that are transferred onto wax collected from churches, texts embroidered on hangings, trimmings, medallions resembling ex-votos, jingle bells… Emma Tholot collects the details of a decorum that she recomposes and re-enacts using scenographic devices inspired by street theater, moving from documentary to fiction and from reality to fantasy. It’s as if we were entering the backstage of a play just about to be performed, and in which we encounter the ghostly presence of its main protagonist: Carmela.

Beyond her initial fascination with the folklore and popular beliefs that inhabit the Mediterranean shores, Emma Tholot questions the hierarchy of the sexes as performed by these cultures during rites of passage. The artist celebrates the resistance and subversive power of women through the stories they pass on from generation to generation, as if to ward off the curse of male domination.’