Marie Voignier is primarily concerned with tied realities, complex stories in which several truths are mixed. Each of her projects is built following a unique approach guided by the subject and the human relationships it weaves. 

If her works seem fed by a scientific spirit of investigation and testimony, they foil any allocation of the image to reality telling and found their way to get around the post-colonial speech, as to let an active role to the subject itself. “I am not in an ethnographic approach but in a will to historicize the glance,” she says.

Her new film Tinselwood that earned her a nomination to the Prix Marcel Duchamp reflects a research initiated in 2010, while she was following a cryptozoologist in the forest of Cameroon tracking a fictional animal documented by locals (L’hypothèse du Mokélé-Mbembé, 2011).

On site she realizes her lack of knowledge of the region’s colonial history. It took her several years before finding again the Salapoumbé farmers with whom she conducts a series of interviews to try to understand how this story was erased, transmitted, transformed, reconstructed. Based on these interviews that will lead to a book, the film develops sequences of tableaux built on a daily basis. 

At the heart of a forest forgotten by the urban society of the country – an enclaved island where people lived independently before western concessions arrive – memoirs, narratives and beliefs find their way.