The video, Mes poupées, starts with a fixed shot framing Marie-Ange Guilleminot's lap and hands. She is kneading soft, flexible, flesh-coloured objects: these are her ' dolls', made from nylon stockings filled with seeds and talc, material which offers malleability and gradual changes of shape.

Following the example of La Démonstration du Chapeau-Vie, this tape is the recording of an action on an object that appears elsewhere in Marie-Ange Guilleminot's works.
Since 1993, she has used a variety of media to display her 'dolls' – a videotape, a sculptural object to be touched and a series of photographs where she asked her male friends to take these forms and turn them into outgrowths of their bodies.

During the video, Marie-Ange Guilleminot becomes involved in a sensual relationship with her 'dolls': they become an extension of herself and take on ambivalent forms, evoking first male and then female genital organs. The clinical gestures create an erotic language, where the vocabulary encloses a hermetic meaning. The movement from masculine forms to feminine forms places us in the context of a hermaphrodite world.

And while the dolls of the title, Mes poupées, may recall childhood, there is no regressive reference to innocent play, but rather a reference to a time when sexuality is not yet fixed, a world of discovery through touch and without inhibition, rather like an obscure Garden of Eden. The obsessive repetition of movement contrasts with the sensuality that it contains. A gentle violence can be detected behind the manipulation.

The soft sculptures of Poupées refer to a theme of modern sculpture – shapelessness. This comparison should not only be considered in its literal sense – in the use of a soft shape – but also in the sense of a redefinition of a work's function, which varies according to the contexts of exposure in which they are found.

" Marie-Ange Guilleminot's works aren't searching for a specific place or determined space; they fight against any idea of being fixed. This indeterminate quality, by excluding categories (it's not directly a video, nor an installation, nor an action, nor even a performance) is focused on her own stamping ground [...]."1

Laetitia Rouiller

1. Stéphanie Moisdon-Trembley, catalogue of the Lyon Biennial, 1995.