Emma Tholot’s multifaceted practice combines photography, video, textiles, wax, and metal, exploring how images, materials, and objects connect the intimate with the collective stage. Her approach draws on daily and ancestral rituals, as well as family heritage, intertwining the memory of heterotopic places, the materiality of desire, and systems of belief. Through processes of layering, veiling, and photographic transfers, her work reveals the image in a state of fragility, suspended between appearance and disappearance. Set between Southern Italy and Marseille, these two recent projects inhabit the same gray areas: those where belief, memory, and identity are negotiated.
Piccole Passioni (2024, Southern Italy) draws on Italian Baroque aesthetics to explore the contemporary relationship to belief, superstition, and self-performance. Naples, a city resistant to order, embodies the Baroque intuition here: the alliance of the funereal and the voluptuous, the theatricalization of existence, identity in perpetual metamorphosis. Through its key motifs—the mask, the veil, concealment—the project explores the transitions between the visible and the invisible, the sacred and the profane. Beneath the mask, a paradoxical truth emerges: we are never more ourselves than in the midst of metamorphosis.
Forever Blur (2025 – ongoing, Marseille) extends this exploration by slowing down the pace of photographic visibility. Through transfers onto wax and fabric, the project creates objects that straddle the boundaries between image, sculpture, and costume, inspired by the ex-votos of Southern Italy. Wax, an organic material akin to skin, keeps the image in a state of fragile appearance; the textile places it within a domestic and ritualistic context. Fueled by a utopian imagination rooted in the visions of a clairvoyant grandmother, this work in progress conceives of photography not as proof, but as the survival of a presence.
Born in Saint-Étienne in 1994, Emma Tholot is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (2020), the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma (2018), and the École d’art d’Annecy (2016). She lives and works in Marseille. She has exhibited at the Centre Photographique Marseille (2022, 2025), the Salon du Montrouge (2023), and the Institut français in Mainz, Germany (2024).
