Manon Garcia
- Anna Lilli Garai
- May 27
- 3 min read
Manon Garcia builds quiet spaces using memory, language, and sound. She works with photography, sculpture, and audio to create scenes that feel like they’re caught in a moment—something just happened, or is about to. Everyday objects and familiar phrases shift meaning depending on how they’re shown. A frozen artichoke heart. A misty field printed like wallpaper. She doesn’t tell full stories. Instead, she shares fragments that feel both personal and shared, letting images and sounds appear slowly, like something partly remembered.
Q: What usually kicks off a new piece for you—a memory, a sound, something visual?
A: All three. It's rare for all of them to come at the same time, but my ideas always stem from a memory—whether it's visual, sonic, textual, or emotional. It depends on the subject or question I want to explore.
Q: You often blend photography, sound, and sculpture. How do you know when they’ve landed as one work?
A: I choose to combine different projects when I feel the need to create a piece, an installation, or a space that allows the viewer to reactivate several senses at once. For example, if I create a sculpture that engages touch, I like to add sound to it—evoking the atmosphere I want to convey through the object.
This combination allows the viewer to project themselves through touch and hearing, creating a new space or mental image, or even recalling a specific landscape or moment—without any actual image present in the room.
It’s this very principle of memory and sensory awakening that interests me. Mixing several pieces or projects allows for the reactivation of almost all the bodily senses, even if some aren’t physically present.
Q: “Coeur d’artichaut” plays with language and materials. How do words shape your visual ideas?
A: Sometimes words shape my visual ideas, but that’s not always the case. I’ve always been intrigued by the construction of words, their pronunciation, and their sound.
For example, the word “knees” is pronounced Je-Nous in French—so the idea of creating forms to illustrate these phonetic details comes to me quickly. The same applies to expressions we use daily.
What I wanted to convey with the sculpture entitled “Coeur d’artichaut” (“Artichoke Heart”) is rooted in a French expression that originated from a 19th-century proverb, later simplified to the phrase: “Cœur d’artichaut, une feuille pour tout le monde” (“Artichoke heart, a leaf for everyone”).
The analogy comes from how you eat an artichoke—removing the leaves one by one to get to the tender heart.
So, someone with an “artichoke heart” gives their love as freely and generously as the leaves fall away. By extension, it’s also a poetic metaphor: whether you like it or not, the artichoke heart is known for its tenderness.
It’s the most generous part of the plant, just as the heart is the seat of human emotion. That’s why I chose to take a real artichoke and freeze it in resin—I wanted the visual to directly echo the expression.
Q: Silence, mist, and pause show up a lot in your images. What draws you to that kind of atmosphere?
A: What attracts me to that kind of atmosphere is the mystery it holds—suspended and unresolved. These atmospheres, often found in visually poetic films, are also similar to certain familiar or everyday landscapes. Their play of light and shadow alters temporality and changes the visual experience for each viewer.
Q: How do you decide what stays as documentation and what turns into an installation?
A: It really depends on the moment. I’ve been working with photographic, audio, and textual archives for six years, and I consider these archives as both documentation and artworks in themselves.
Since I aim to revive memories and emotions, I know that as I evolve within an environment, my way of seeing, hearing, and feeling also changes. Eventually, any archive can become a piece, an installation.
This becomes even more intuitive when I work with words or expressions. I select sculptures, sounds, or images that best reflect what I want to express—so that people can feel it.
Q: Do you want your pieces to feel personal, or more like a shared space for others to wander into?
A: A bit of both. I want the installation spaces to be shared—so that several people can enter and experience them at the same time. But the personal aspect also matters deeply to me.
The way I present my sculptural and sound pieces initially refers to the collective. I’ve been increasingly interested in proxemics—the study of personal and social space—and I try to create environments where multiple people can move around and coexist.
But proxemics also questions how we feel in relation to space, so inevitably there will be moments when personal emotions arise within a shared experience.
