"La preuve par 1/3," Mathilde Pellé, 2017, CID collection at Le Grand-Hornu.
SOUSTRAIRE
WHY IS THERE SOMETHING RATHER THAN LESS?
"Soustraire" is a research project led since 2016 by designer and artist Mathilde Pellé.
The positive reassures us but can also overwhelm us; the negative worries us but also lightens the load. Ideally, we shouldn’t be at the mercy of the positive and the negative; instead, they should be viewed together as a balancing act between fullness and emptiness.
The “Subtract” approach is not a slogan; it is both an exercise in reflection and an attitude to be put into practice. Through this work, I explore forms, gestures, and subtractive possibilities. It forces me to place subtraction on the same level as addition. Subtraction is not synonymous with lack, and addition is not synonymous with satisfaction. Both are means of transforming our spaces, our objects, and our ways of life.
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.
Minimalism also allows us to question the status quo. If the “why” of an object eludes us, we can detach ourselves from it. When a form bothers us, we can view it as a curiosity that might disappear.
EXHIBITION / RESIDENCY
TONS OF
November 17–December 12, 2025
Chambre des méthodes – DROP !, Saint-Étienne
with support from Albertine Founds and theMarie-Thérèse Allier Fund for Contemporary Art
In February 2024, Mathilde Pellé boarded a container ship in Savannah (on the U.S. East Coast) that made stops in Philadelphia, Rotterdam, London Gateway, and Dunkirk—where she disembarked. Immersed in this confined space of people and equipment, the artist collects testimonies, images, and data about the ship, its crew, its cargo, and the voyage underway. By transforming this documentary material for the exhibition, she describes and sheds light on a major yet invisible artery of globalized logistics: maritime transport.
During her residency at the Chambre des Méthodes, and alongside the installations she created during her voyage on a container ship, Mathilde Pellé unpacks and examines the advent calendar. A likely catalyst for consumerism and a tangible countdown to the annual peak of commercial activity (which is the holiday season), this object enters domestic spaces in late November. Between Black Friday and Christmas, it dispenses its daily batch of chocolates and small trinkets on a massive scale
EXHIBITION
MATHILDE PELLÉ, CHEMIN CREUX
June 8–December 29, 2024
, Martell Foundation, Cognac
The Martell Corporate Foundation is launching its new exhibition-residency format and inviting designer Mathilde Pellé to share and develop her research project*Soustraire*. By showcasing various aspects of the work she has been conducting since 2016—which is at once experimental, critical, formal, and theoretical—the exhibition encourages us to take a closer look at the objects our societies offer and at the forms that can emerge through subtraction. Pellé continues to explore the inexhaustible question that guides her creations, her thinking, and her relationship to design: “Why is there something rather than less?”
workshop / residency
CITRO SUBSTRAT 1987
September 10–October 5, 2024
as part of the exhibition “Autofiction
” at CID in Grand-Hornu, Belgium
with students from the auto body repair program at the Lycée Provincial d’Hornu.
Study and subtraction-based transformation of a 1987 Citroën BX. Opening up a car to see how it works and imagining, by directly altering its form, what might have been missing from the very start of its design. An analysis of the car’s technical and material opulence, reminding us how objects are always conceived as solid, complete forms in a world where resources are becoming scarce.
EXHIBITION
MAISON SOUSTRAIRE, A POSTERIORI
June 4–July 31, 2022
12th Saint-Étienne International Biennial
on the "Maison soustraire" project
FILM
MEUBLÉ
2022 *
* A film directed by Jean-Baptiste Warluzel about the *Maison Soustraire* project
60 minutes – part of the FRAC Grand-Large collection
By visiting the “Maison soustraire” apartment on several occasions, director Jean-Baptiste Warluzel was able to capture on camera the transformation of the domestic space inhabited by Mathilde Pellé and her dog Jobard.
A slow immersion centered on the use of objects, the film documents the gestures, adaptations, and habits that emerged during this exercise in material subtraction.
experimental project
HOUSE SUBTRACT
2020–2021
experimental projectDeep Design Lab / Cité du Design,École Urbaine de Lyon, Agence Nationale de la Recherche.
“Maison Soustraire: 8 weeks to remove two-thirds of the material content from the 112 objects that make up my living space—an apartment on Rue Neyron in Saint-Étienne.
The goal is to dissect, one by one, the objects offered by contemporary Western society and thereby examine the traces of a lifestyle that is undoubtedly built around them. I will inhabit the successive material realities of this domestic environment as it evolves from prototype to ruin. My dog joins me; I use 109 objects, and he uses 3.”
There were 112 objects comprising the entire domestic environment at the start of the experiment; two-thirds of the material (by weight) was removed from each of them. Each object was tracked and documented throughout the project, from its purchase through its transformations and hybridizations to its final use within the apartment.
The extensive documentation and the wide range of data and objects from this experiment are showcased in exhibitions. The film *Meublé*, directed by Jean-Baptiste Warluzel, offers a glimpse into the transformation of objects and the actions they inspire.
The film, various objects from the project, and the project archive were added to the collection of the FRAC Grand Large Hauts-de-France in Dunkirk in 2026.
residence
me SOUSTRAIRE
September 6–October 31, 2021
Cap Moderne site, Roquebrune Cap-Martin
Eileen Gray Association . Starfish . Le Corbusier
Following its call for applications for the 2021 residency season, the Eileen Gray . Etoile de mer. Le Corbusier Association will welcome designer Mathilde Pellé to the Cap Moderne site, where she will develop various aspects of her research project *Soustraire*. She will use these two months to disconnect from technology and live without a phone, computer, or internet. She will observe the resulting strategies and changes in daily life and document the experience through writing. She hypothesizes that the absence of technological tools will lead her to a more direct form of social interaction.
At the same time, she will work on transforming large fabric panels through subtraction, developing and carrying out manual work to remove material from fabric samples. The hypotheses explored—questioning a presence, reconfiguring without adding—all aim to exercise “less,” an underestimated potential that is nonetheless a direction worth exploring, just like any other.
PHOTOGRAPHY
EXFOLIATORS
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
June 28 – July 7, 2018
Exhibition “Stop Growth!”
CID at Grand-Hornu, Belgium
Designer Mathilde Pellé lives here comfortably, but a shortage of materials is threatening the society in which she lives. Every day, following the implementation of a new tax, she must provide the state with 9 kilograms of any materials from her home. To meet this requirement, she begins collecting materials from the bourgeois domestic environment recreated within the CID space. She removes ornaments, scrapes away the superfluous, files down the essential, and tries to preserve the objects around her and the functions they serve. This new experimental project is a contemporary fable without a moral that sketches out a near future where current notions of comfort and decor would be completely upended by a decline in material resources.
experimental project
OBJECTS DISAPPEAR
March 9–April 9, 2017
10th Saint-Étienne International Biennial
Designer Mathilde Pellé lives in an apartment on Rue de la République in Saint-Étienne. There, day after day, she carries out an experimental project focused on the removal of objects and materials.