Marion Thomas

Artists have always tackled universal subjects such as emotions and identity, as well as the contemporary challenges of their time. Yet the works of art are not designed to provide an answer, but rather to create and make visible a certain perspective linked to the subject being addressed. In her kit de survive en milieu masculiniste, Marion Thomas has chosen to touch on complex and sensitive societal themes, simply by drawing parallels between other people's stories and her own. Her projects are in fact the result of long reflection over the years, combined with her own introspection.

Born into a working-class family, Marion grew up in Évry. From the age of five, she takes up the theatre to compensate for her difficulties in expressing herself, but loses interest in it when she reaches adolescence. Solitary and withdrawn, she takes refuge in literature and video games, which she is still passionate about today. She receives her first console at the age of six and spends a lot of time on the internet reading and entertaining herself as soon as she gets her first computer. Around the age of thirteen, her brother introduces her to online games. With her headset and microphone, she plays Counter Strike, but in the face of violent misogynistic insults from other players, she quickly gives up. Girls are clearly not accepted simply for being girls, so every time she appears in the game, Marion is repeatedly eliminated, leaving her with only a few seconds to live. She continues to play, but locally, with no interaction with the virtual community.

Higher education enables Marion to break out of her social milieu and open up culturally to a world that had previously seemed inaccessible to her. She leaves the Paris region for the first time to study at the Faculté de Lettres in Nantes, graduating with a Master's degree in theatrical research. Through specialised literature on the theatre of the 14th century fair, she reconnects with her field. For a long time, she had not allowed herself to return to what she had given up when she was younger, and she gets back into acting. After her studies, she joins theatre companies and takes on a number of projects, including an interactive play in which the only character is a woman torn between the need to adopt a sustainable, autonomous lifestyle and her passion for video games. We learn that video games can be used to organise groups and create shared imaginary worlds. The audience is connected to a screen from which they can choose a scenario and thus influence the narrative. The play obviously echoes Marion's own experience, and she quickly realises that writing about subjects interests her, as does acting in her own plays.

She still spends a lot of time on the internet, which has become an essential part of her creative process and her main source of inspiration. She becomes interested in T.A.Z: Temporary Anonymous Zone, a book by Hakim Bey in which he describes a utopian internet in which civil society organises itself to fight and emancipate itself from capitalism. She then begins to follow the development of alternative groups such as the famous hacktivists Anonymous on the 4chan platform, or the body hackers known for implanting foreign bodies in theirs on an experimental basis and with an open source vocation, in particular Sapiens Anonym. It is whilst discovering all these subcultures that she comes across the incels, the group she spends the most time with.

After this period of small-scale projects, she moves to Lausanne, where she takes up a master's degree in directing, and spends four years there. Her experience of the public space is different from that in France, and she feels that Swiss civil society is more proactive when it comes to defending women. On completing her master's degree, she begins writing her very first play, Kit de survie en milieu masculiniste. As we know, it's 2018, and Marion has been following the evolution of incels through Reddit forums. She looks back on her traumatic experience of online video games and compares herself to Elliot Rodger, who became part of a large virtual community thanks to World of Warcraft. If their only differences were socio-economic background and gender, their respective experiences of social life seemed rather similar.

Marion thinks a lot about violence and mental disorders; women are more likely to internalise, resorting to self-harm for example, whereas men externalise. The writer and activist Rebecca Solnit, from whom she draws her inspiration, points out that although Elliot Rodger had psychological problems that drove him to the edge of his thoughts, it would be wrong to believe that his act is isolated. Others before and after him took the plunge for the same reasons. Because we all share a culture in which it is deeply rooted that men mobilise their physical strength, and because the patriarchy that pervades our society divides women and men between the status of victim and executioner. In a way, legitimising the systemic dimension of Elliot's gesture makes it possible to move the boundaries of the global problem.

So misogyny is everywhere, but the internet is special in the sense that it has made it possible to propagate and give a special place to extreme rhetoric, and Marion has had a good experience of this. Although women are increasingly asserting themselves in gamer communities, they are still subject to masculinist raids. The Covid period helped to accentuate this phenomenon and radicalise worrying behaviour, cyber-bullying has taken over and women are still the first victims of online hate speech. But there are 50% men on the planet, so Marion knows that we must all make the effort to work together to ensure greater inclusiveness. She also knows that forcing an idea on an individual is not the key to changing mentalities, so she strives to create a welcoming space through her pieces where empathy is the order of the day, and where everyone can leave with their own idea of the subject. On a personal level, writing this project has allowed her to exorcise herself and finally move on.

Back in Nantes, she revisits the subject of masculinity, this time through musk, an ingredient so coveted for centuries for making perfumes and for its supposedly powerful aphrodisiac properties. It is in fact the gland of the musk deer, an animal classified as 'vulnerable' because of poaching. This project takes the form of an escape game that she is designing for the Nantes School of Architecture. The main theme is the preservation of biodiversity, which she has taken up more recently in a new project on hake. Although we don't know much about this fish, it is one of the most widely consumed in France. To give an idea of the scale of the situation, it is difficult to find them older than 5 years, when they can live for 20.

Marion was contacted by a group of scientists for this project. They are creating algorithms to monitor variations in the fish population in the oceans, but to do this they need the help of fishermen. The data is then sent to the European Council, which adjusts its fishing policy to prevent overfishing. This inevitably has a negative impact on fishermen, who in turn are reluctant to communicate with scientists. That's where Marion comes in; she's going to keep a diary of the meetings between fishermen and scientists, which will later be the subject of a play about hake, for which she has become very fond in the meantime. Hake is one of the 'non-charismatic' species of biodiversity, meaning that it is not sufficiently popular in our imaginations, like the dolphin or the tiger, to encourage subsidies for conservation activities. In a way, hake and incels have this in common: they lack the charisma needed to live in peace, and Marion feels affection for them.

Marion Thomas chooses complex and delicate contemporary themes that are open to debate, and always approaches them in an introspective way.

By sharing her kindly eye, she conveys powerful messages and manages to move the boundaries of the preconceptions with which we live.