Mona Cholet | The passion for images

Since the publication of his essay witches, journalist Mona Chollet has become a key figure in French feminism. Surprise: she returns with a completely different book devoted to her collection of images. We met her in Paris.

(Paris) Mona Chollet gives us an appointment at the Café de l’Industrie, in the 11^e district where she lives. The one who until very recently was head of the desk at the Diplomatic world has become a real star of French feminism. His trials Witches – The Undefeated Power of Women and Reinventing Love – How Patriarchy Sabotages Straight Relationships elevated her to the rank of feminist icon, particularly among young women who have made witches their rallying cry.

When we met, we were also presenting a musical reading of excerpts from witches at the Atelier theater in Montmartre. Mona Chollet was not involved in the project, which is the initiative of a collective of women, but she gave her permission. The result: a real happening, as they say in Paris. Sold-out performances and standing ovations every night.

She seems almost surprised. “I have the impression that there is a kind of misunderstanding, she says, modestly. When I write, I really start from my experience and the questions that I ask myself in a very personal way. It produces feminist essays because I am a woman, and I come up against things in my life. My approach is not at all systematic, and I can have big failures on certain subjects. I don’t know everything about feminism, there are aspects that interest me more than others. I’m not a theorist at all, I tinker with theory along the way. »

Images to dream

Mona Chollet’s new book breaks with her two previous essays. Images and fresh water is more in line with At home – an odyssey of domestic spacepublished in 2015. It is an introspective, richly illustrated work, in which the author shares part of her collection of digital images and reflects on their power by invoking thinkers such as Barthes, Plato or Sontag.

This collection has become a real ritual: every morning, at coffee time, after having toured the information sites, Mona Chollet visits her favorite sites. When she likes an image, she pins it to her Pinterest account. She has accumulated thousands of them, which she classifies by theme: Japanese images, tarot images, portraits of women, black and white photos, images of cities at night, of stairs…

“It’s a way of getting off the beat of the news,” she says. It brings me peace. »

Mona Chollet says she prefers Pinterest to the social network Instagram, also an image site, but which she associates more with performance. Quite the opposite of what she is looking for. “I’m very reluctant to stage my own life,” she says. I find there is an easily aggressive and competitive side to Instagram. I don’t at all want to find myself trying to give an ideal image of my life. »

Pinterest is the equivalent of a scrapbook digital that Mona Chollet feeds first for her personal pleasure, then out of a desire to share. “For me, this collection is like Tom Thumb’s pebbles,” she says. I can decide to look at all the images in chronological order and it reminds me of periods in my life. It’s like a diary, a bit encrypted. It says things that only I understand. »

Another way of thinking

Mona Chollet assures that her book is not a pandemic project – “I started this collection about ten years ago and my editor had been pushing me to write this book for some time now” – but we must recognize that Image and fresh water absolutely corresponds to the spirit of the times, to this need we feel to surround ourselves with soothing things after several trying years.

The main interested party affirms for her part that this immersion in the images is a source of vitality. “The world is so hard,” she observes. It feels so much like bumping into something violent on all sides. There is enormous pessimism and after a while, it becomes complicated to simply know how to hold on and maintain a form of vital desire. Pictures give me that. »

Her collection of images, she adds, helps her to think differently, to go back and forth between the intimate, the social and the political. The images, like a sort of meditation, fuel his writing and his creativity. “It completely diverts my thinking, it takes paths that it wouldn’t take if I were only in intellectual thinking,” says Mona Chollet.

This book may have the same effect on you. One thing is certain, it may make you want to collect the images furiously, too.

Images and fresh water

Mona Chollet

flammarion

192 pages