Studio visit: Memymom

Wunderkammer goes Wunderhaus. Since 2004, mother Marilène Coolens and daughter Lisa De Boeck have also been known by Memymom, an artistic alias that has turned their family home upside down. “It’s on, mom, it’s on!”

In 2000, Mark Z. Danielewski published House of Leaves, a book to last a lifetime. A house on Ash Tree Lane appears to be bigger on the inside than on the outside, an anomaly Danielewski uses to compile a massive, labyrinthine work with a range of characters, genres, styles, fonts, and references to things both in and outside the book, which devours every scrap of its readers. Reading becomes a physical experience, fiction that palpably breathes down your neck. You can find another such house in the middle of a street in Molenbeek. Although this one does not house a nightmarish, roaring Minotaur, there is a fascinating interplay of life and fiction here, making the very real walls expand into a wondrous universe with theatrical clutches on reality.

The house is home to the lives and works of the mother and daughter collective Marilène Coolens (1953) and Lisa De Boeck (1985), who since 2004 go by the moniker of Memymom. Lives and works; the one is mute without the other. On the walls and stacked on the floor, the whole house is covered with frames depicting the photographic memories of imagined, dramatised lives, roles rooted in the clustered manifestation of the past, present, and future. As though time unfolds here into a parallelism of dimensions. Catwoman Uncensored shows the nine-year-old Lisa De Boeck licking her lips in a homemade superhero outfit; The Misfit presents her at eleven years old, literally and figuratively out of touch with herself, her generation, and the expectations of a society that has forgotten what it means to have fun; The Junkie High on Love shows the logical consequence.

The Umbilical Vein is the title of the 2013 project in which mother and daughter shared a selection from their intimate family photo archive – photos taken between 1990 and 2003. Pictures that are genuinely playful, of dress-up parties, dreamlike and anxious visions of the future, of a child who acts and ages in front of the staging camera. Lisa De Boeck: “Exhibiting these photos wasn’t easy: you expose an incredibly intimate part of your life, and something that people might easily misinterpret. But I am happy that we did decide to exhibit them. You’re familiar with them, you know what they’re about, and you know your own core. You can’t escape from that.”

But these are sensitive images. Behind closed doors, the grown-up fantasies of small children (dreaming of a cleavage or of being the future First Lady) remain in the right context; publicly, the state of the world matters too. Marilène Coolens: “I always spent a lot of time playing with my children, which came naturally since I was a teacher of physical education. I used the same creativity at home so they also learned to play with each other; it was magical sometimes. At first Lisa's brothers joined in, but after a while they found it a bit too silly. Lisa, on the other hand, loved dressing up and being in front of the camera, and so we continued our dress-up parties all those years. But it happened without any artistic intentions, we never planned to exhibit them.”

When asked what did inspire them to exhibit The Umbilical Vein ten years after the series ended, the answer is uncomfortably clear. Marilène Coolens: “I guess it was your father.” Lisa De Boeck: “Yes… Those photos were always displayed on a cupboard at home. My dad always supported us… well… he left us to our own devices. [Laughs] But at a certain point he said: ‘You ought to make a book.’ I never forgot that. It was a kind of epiphany to me.” Marilène Coolens: “After my husband’s death in 2002 we stopped the series. We just couldn’t do it anymore because we had other issues to deal with. The photos in The Umbilical Vein brought up much more stuff from the past. It was just too difficult.” Lisa De Boeck: “For six years, I woke up every morning thinking about him. This is a completely different life now. I consciously made the decision to start something new. But you can’t erase your past, you always carry it with you. I prefer to disseminate the inheritance of The Umbilical Vein by pursuing the beauty of that irreverence. That’s more interesting than building a shrine and going to live at the graveyard.”

Memymom is exactly what it says: though the project might test the blood-tie, it can only ever make it stronger. Lisa De Boeck: “Our relationship is automatic and unconditional. We sometimes have a different vision, but we always engage with and tackle the resulting discussions openly. That always takes us exactly where we need to go. We do bend, yes, but we never break.” Marilène Coolens: “It is a matter of trust. Of healthy competition too. We tease each other all the time, but we also complement each other. When we bought a computer in 2004, right at the start of the collaborative project, I started using Photoshop. I eventually got even better at it than Lisa.” Lisa De Boeck: “Oh really? It’s on, mom, it’s on! [Roaring laughter] But seriously, perhaps we can go even further than other duos precisely because our relationship is unconditional. One thing is for sure: I wouldn’t want to do it alone; that just wouldn’t be right.”

With unconditional love and trust comes an intuitive approach. Lisa De Boeck: “Yes, it’s like we’re compelled to follow our gut instinct. Which doesn’t mean that it isn’t difficult sometimes. For example, when I went to Art Brussels a few ago, I was struck by how hollow, conceptual, and heartless some of the contemporary art on display was. When I compared that to what we were doing… When your world collides so violently with another world, especially one which is so prominent and that you actually want to be a part of, it is extremely difficult. But at times like that you just have to have the guts to realise that what you are doing is right and that the audience might at one point see it the same way. Since The Umbilical Vein I no longer have a that particular fear that I used to have. You can’t be led by what other people think. I just want to feel relaxed with what we produce, have the courage simply to exhibit what we want to exhibit.”

That strong will results in photography and video projects like The Baby Blues (a metaphorical revisiting of The Umbilical Vein, a parody of the gimmick, of the idea that artists always repeat themselves) or La gloire fanée (a trick with simulated time in which Lisa De Boeck adopts the guise of a child star who has grown older). These are projects in which, in staggering mise en scènes, art and life become intimately entangled, where reality paradoxically shines through all the acted roles because they have been given enough time to get the image to that pulsing level. Marilène Coolens: “What you see is never perfect. Nothing and nobody is perfect. We cannot ignore our humanity. That is what makes it so beautiful.”

The staging is another element that contributes to the stunning beauty of what Memymom does. In the pictures, you see them unfold as though they were veritable theatre or opera stages. The image sometimes contains so much symbolic and intimate expressiveness that it grabs you by the throat. Humans are more than one emotion, more than one history. The fact that Lisa De Boeck often inhabits the same image in various guises is closely linked to Memymom's penchant for the narrative aspect. Rather than making a series, the duo wants to imbue a single image with a whole story. This necessarily makes the details very significant. Details like décor (pretty much every floor and room in the house) and costumes (often straightjackets or corsets, garments that restrain or trap people, and which Marilène Coolens makes herself in her sewing room or which they go and pick out together on the Vossenplein/place du Jeu de Balle). Marilène Coolens: “I’m originally from Zottegem, but I came to school in Brussels when I was fourteen. I immediately fell in love with the city. It was a different world. The Beursschouwburg, the AB, L’Archiduc… all places we visited so often in those days.”

At the Beursschouwburg, Memymom is taking part in the exhibition that celebrates both the rich history and the grand future of the home. Dusting off the Memory is a series of images in which the two look back at and pay tribute to their relationship (and that of husband/father Jo De Boeck) with Jan Decorte and Sigrid Vinks, in whose Bloetwollefduivel, the "ultimate play about evil", Lisa De Boeck performed when she was nine. Lisa De Boeck: “I actually wanted to study drama, I wanted to go to America, to the Actor’s Studio… None of that worked out. When dad died, my dreams were all broken. And at a time like that it is very difficult to build a new dream. I couldn’t let go of where we were or who we were. I’m still fighting really hard for that, to keep what we had then and build on it.”

That requires freedom, which is something both find at their house in Molenbeek. Lisa De Boeck: “I'm not travelling back and forth at the moment, and I feel comfortable here. If I were to have to make a choice in life, I’d prefer to make one that I knew was real and that helped me to develop as a person more than so many other possible choices. I want to die knowing that I chose my family, and that I wanted that love. Just to end with a real tearjerker…” [Laughs]

All photos © Gautier Houba

Borough: Molenbeek
Exhibitions: “The Future = Beurssc50uwburg”: > 30/5, Beursschouwburg, www.beursschouwburg.be; “Occupied Emotions”: > 19/4, Broelkaai 6, www.bu-box.be
Info: www.memymom.com