After exploring various sociological phenomena that put the female body to the test in the digital age (cam girls, love dolls, female influencers), Marilou Poncin is pursuing her investigations into the evolution of our fantasies as mediated by technological tools. Her installation Liquid Love is Full of Ghosts is inspired by speculative design: through fiction, the artist imagines plausible technological objects. These, unlike the love dolls, are non-anthropomorphic, yet individuals can forge an emotional and sensory relationship with them.

Pre-empting the future even as it unfolds, the installation is built around three portraits in which each of the characters, mired in his or her solitude, is about to experience a quasi-carnal moment with a cutting-edge technological object—an immaculately polished, high-tech sedan car, a sensory suit made of smart fabric, an eminently tactile screen. The skin indeed plays a central role. Admittedly, the cells that constitute it have given way to substitute skins that are one with the flesh: sticky skin ready to be torn, vibrating skin ready to palpate, skin against skin. Tactility is ubiquitous in these proxy contacts where fluids and flows mingle.

The title alludes to Zygmunt Bauman's book Liquid Love. The sociologist analyzes the changes affecting the individual in a society where the bonds between people have dissolved because of a constant fear of rejection. The “palliative” objects in the installation fill the anxiety of solitude as much as they fill a void.

In this rather dark universe, the bluish lights of the connected objects are the common signal of this physical, flesh-and synthetic relationship.