SOUSTRAIRE
The more reassures and also saturates; the less worries and lightens. Ideally, we shouldn't be subjected to plus and minus, they should be considered together as a balancing act between fullness and emptiness.
My Subtraction approachis not a watchword; it's both an exercise in reflection and an attitude to put into practice. Through this work, I study shapes, gestures and subtractive possibilities. It forces me to bring minus down to the same level as addition. Less is not synonymous with lack, and more is not synonymous with satisfaction. Both are means of transforming our spaces, objects and lifestyles.
We draw with less: we can form an object by gradually removing material so that the full shape appears, we can make a reserve in a wall so that a window exists.
Minus also allows us to question what exists. If the 'why' of an object escapes us, we can detach ourselves from it. When a shape bothers us, we can observe it as a curiosity that might disappear.'
WHY IS THERE SOMETHING RATHER THAN LESS?
EXHIBITION
MATHILDE PELLÉ, CHEMIN CREUX
08.06 > 29.12.2024 - Fondation Martell, Cognac
The Fondation d'Entreprise Martell launches its new exhibition-residency format and invites designer Mathilde Pellé to share and develop her Soustraire research approach. Deploying different aspects of the work carried out since 2016 - at once experimental, critical, formal and theoretical - the exhibition encourages us to take a close look at the objects our societies propose and the forms that can emerge through subtraction. Pellé pursues the inexhaustible question that directs his creations, his thinking and his relationship to design: "Why is there something rather than less?"
EXHIBITION
MAISON SOUSTRAIRE, A POSTERIORI
06.04 > 31.07.2022 - XIIth International Biennial Saint-Étienne
FILM
MEUBLÉ
Film directed by Jean-Baptiste Warluzel on the Maison Soustraire project- 60 min - 2022
Director Jean-Baptiste Warluzel's repeated visits to the Maison Soustraire apartment enabled him to observe with his camera the transformation of the domestic space inhabited by Mathilde Pellé and her dog Jobard.
A slow immersion based on the use of objects, the film bears witness to the gestures, adaptations and habits that emerged during this exercise in material subtraction.
residence
me SOUSTRAIRE
06.09 > 31.10.2021 - site Cap Moderne - Association Eileen Gray . Étoile de mer . Le Corbusier - Roquebrune Cap-Martin
Following its call for residencies for the 2021 season, the Association Eileen Gray. Etoile de mer. Le Corbusier - in partnership with the Conservatoire du Littoral, owner of the site, and the Centre des Monuments nationaux in charge of its management - has selected designer Mathilde Pellé as its candidate. She will be hosted on the Cap Moderne site from September 6 to October 31, 2021, to develop her research project Soustraire.
This residency, entitled "me Soustraire", will enable her to stay at the heart of the historic site, in this natural environment cut off from the usual, where others before her have come to seek a holiday, provoke frugality and cultivate a different everyday life. "I'd like to withdraw for a while, to work on Subtracting. If I immerse myself here for a while with my approach, it will be to form an echo with the history of the place: to simply live and work here."
Continuing her projects on the subtraction of matter and domestic objects, Mathilde Pellé will take advantage of these two months to operate a technological detachment and live without a personal telephone, computer or internet. She will observe the strategies and changes in daily life that result from this, and report on the experience in an article. Assuming that the absence of technological tools will lead her back to a more direct sociality, linked to her actual encounters on the territory, and that by making herself in some way unavailable to the distant, she will be more disposed to experience the immediacy of her environment.
In addition to this investigation, which covers her residency/retirement period, she will be working on a first rendering of her Maison Soustraire project, to be presented at the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne 2022, and on the manual subtraction of material from large fabric sample panels. These two practices - one of thought, the other of gesture - should enable her to develop the multiple aspects of her research project. The hypotheses addressed - questioning a presence, assuming a form's bare essentials, reconfiguring without adding - are all aimed at exercising the least, an underestimated potential that is nonetheless a direction like any other to be probed.
experimental project
HOUSE SUBTRACT
2020-2021 - experimental projectcarried out within the Deep Design Lab - Pôle Recherche de la Cité du Design and co-produced by theEcole Urbaine de Lyon - Etudes urbaines anthropocènes, with the support of the Agence Nationale de la Recherche.
Maison Soustraire. 8 weeks to remove 2/3 of the material from the 112 objects that make up my living space - an apartment on rue Neyron in Saint-Etienne.
One by one, I'll dissect the objects that contemporary Western society has to offer, questioning the traces of a way of life that is undoubtedly built around them. I will inhabit the various successive material realities of this ruined domestic environment.
My dog joins me, I make use of 109 objects and he of 3.
Maison Soustraire is based on the hypothesis of a near-future reality in which declining material resources would transform our domestic environments and the objects that make them up. This possibility led me to test the remnants and traces of a current way of life as new, practicable forms.
At the start of the experiment, 112 objects made up the entire domestic environment, and a subtraction of 2/3 of material (by weight) was applied to each of them. Each object was tracked and documented throughout the project, from its purchase, through its transformations and hybridizations, to its final last use in the apartment. In 2023, the extensive documentation and data resulting from this experience are still being used. Interdisciplinary collaborations are working to create the most comprehensive study possible.
PHOTOGRAPHIC SERIES
GOMMAGES
2018 - ongoing series
A subtractive mania regularly compels me, in reaction to everyday scenes to mentally erase elements that, in my opinion, do not contribute do not contribute to any improvement in everyday life and are a physical or visual nuisance. Part of these field reflections materialize in the series Scrubss. Constructed from photographs of my daily life, this work subjectively denounces unwise presences, unfortunate excrescences by erasing them.
I was in an emergency room where PVC folding curtains were installed to separate the beds. A blade of grass and a ladybug were printed on the surface and full height of each of the curtains' last flaps , the "nature print" option in the manufacturer's catalog. Visually, the result was : a ladybug on a 2-metre-high blade of grass - the legs of an old lady wearing charentaises - the same ladybug on a 2-metre-high blade of grass - feet twisted in pain - a third time the ladybug and the blade of grass - an empty bed...The presence of these impressions produced this ridiculous alternation and made the vision painful, much more so for me than if the curtains had remained white and uniform. This decor made reality slam into place more harshly - the first scrub.
experimental project
A PENURY
28.06-07.07.2018
as part of the "Halte à la croissance!" exhibition at the CID in Grand-Hornu, Belgium.
"The designer Mathilde Pellé lives here comfortably, but a shortage of materials is jeopardizing the society in which she lives. Every day, following the introduction of a new tax, she has to provide the state with 9 kilos of any material from her home. To meet this obligation, she begins to remove materials from her domestic environment. This new experimental project is a contemporary fable without morals, depicting a near-future in which ideas of comfort and consumption are completely undermined by a decline in material resources.
experimental project
OBJECTS DISAPPEAR
09.03-09.04.2017
Designer Mathilde Pellé lives in an apartment on the Rue de la République in Saint-Étienne. Here, day after day, she carries out an experimental project involving the subtraction of objects and materials. Her initial environment is made up of 65 common household objects and furnishings; two objects are removed at the end of each day, one chosen by visitor vote, the other by the designer herself. Between the purification of a domestic environment and the simulation of a precarious situation, the project sought to raise these questions:
. To what extent can objects and the 'needs' they satisfy be eliminated, and to what effect?
. What practices, methods or alternative means emerge from the removal of an object specifically dedicated to a function, to fill the void?
. During experimentation, what meaning do emptiness and absence take on - on the scale of the object and in the living space?