Behind the Curtains

'Memymom' is the name used by the artists’ collective and mother-and-daughter team Marilène Coolens (1953) and Lisa De Boeck (1985) since 2004. The seeds of the project were planted in the 1990s, when the photographer Marilène Coolens was taking snapshots of her growing daughter and had her play out scenes from cartoons, fairy tales, and TV shows, in the hope of stimulating little Lisa’s imagination. The result was an intimate family archive of analogue photographs, which memymom later collected under the title ‘The Umbilical Vein’. As the daughter grew up, however, the roles began to shift: Lisa became photographer and model, set dresser and director all at once.