Meeting with Vimala Pons

Vimala Pons talks with Clément Cogitore, studio professor at Beaux-Arts de Paris.

A multimedia and transdisciplinary artist, Vimala Pons trained in competitive sports, art history, cinema, and music. Known for her performances but also for her distinguished career as a film actress, all of her artistic work is based on emotional macro-introspection and the manifestation of imbalance in all its forms. In Honda Romance, her new creation currently being presented as part of the Festival d'Automne, Vimala Pons continues this search for balance, this time focusing on what threatens it: a new dialogue with gravity, which here becomes a metaphor for our emotional instability. While emotions have become new resources to be exploited, Vimala Pons develops a unique response to them.

Vimala Pons initial training was in competitive sports and classical guitar. She then began university studies in art history and film history before enrolling in the Cours Florent drama school, followed by training at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique in Paris and finally at the Centre National des Arts du Cirque. Since 2011, she has been working in independent cinema, acting alongside major directors (Resnais, Rivette, Peretjatko, Mandico, Salvador, Mitre, Kasmi, Castang, Tardieu, Rodenbach, Podalydès, Honoré, Demoustier, Kurosawa, Verhoeven, etc.). Alongside Tsirihaka Harrivel, her partner of 20 years, she wrote and conceived De Nos jours (Notes on the Circus) in 2012 with the Ivan Mosjoukine collective, then, in 2017, GRANDE — , before creating solo works Le Périmètre de Denver (2021) and, this year, Honda Romance. Their musical training led them to compose the music for their six shows, notably Victoire Chose, the soundtrack for GRANDE, released on the Teenage Menopause and Murailles Music labels. In November 2020, Vimala released Mémoires de l'Homme Fente, a 52-minute audiobook, a kind of short film without images, on the independent label Transcachette Tapes.

Alongside Périmètre de Denver, she wrote the audio fiction Eusapia Klane, which was released as an EP in February 2022 (on vinyl and digitally) on the Warriorecords and Kythibong labels. In 2024, her first two exhibitions were presented: I Promise I’ll Come and Rescue You, a collection of videos at the Galerie Anne Barrault. Then Heaven And Hell, an exhibition-installation created in collaboration with photographer Nhu Xuan Hua, created at the Rencontres de la photographie d'Arles 2024. Vimala Pons presents her latest creation Honda Romance in musical collaboration with Rebeka Warrior, Tsirihaka Harrivel, DMRA, and Fiona Monbet, which will premiere at the Comédie de Genève in September 2025.