Mathilde Pellé

Mathilde Pellé is a designer, artist and researcher. Alongside her design activity: objects and spaces, she has been running the Soustraire research project since 2016.

Born in 1987, she lives and works in the Cher region of France. Graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in 2012, she continued her studies in the SAIL group at ENSAD lab until 2015, where she conducted a study on the perception of volumes. At the same time, she set up her studio in the village of Morogues, where she grew up. Her first small-scale productions are presented at Paris Design Week, D'days, Venice Design and by the VIA and Tools galleries.

From 2016, she focused on her research project Soustraire. She then began to question material presences and their effects, and to study existing subtractive models. Her varied practices (experimentation, writing, photography, surveys, etc.) all participate in casting doubt on accepted forms of everyday life, and help to pose this central question: Why is there something rather than something less?

In 2017, the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne hosted the first experimental project Soustraire, les objets disparaissent. In 2018, Marie Pok, director of the CID in Grand-Hornu, includes an object from this experiment in her collections and invites Mathilde to take part in the "Halte à la croissance!" exhibition , where she develops the Une pénurie project. In 2019, the Deep Design Lab founded by the Pôle Recherche de la Cité du design de Saint-Étienne and the Ecole Urbaine de Lyon invites Mathilde to join its research studio. At the end of 2020, she created Maison soustraire, a comprehensive, interdisciplinary experiment in which she progressively removed 2/3 of the material from the domestic environment she inhabited.

She is the first resident to be welcomed by the Eileen Gray association. Étoile de Mer. Le Corbusier, from September to October 2021, she will be living in one of the camping units on the Cap Moderne site, where she will be working on a technological detachment and her research project. In 2022, the scientific committee in charge of the XIIth Saint-Étienne International Design Biennial invited her to share her research methods. She then produced the content and scenography for her first solo exhibition, Maison soustraire, a posteriori.
In 2024, the Fondation Martell presented the Soustraire research process in a dedicated exhibition: Mathilde Pellé, Chemin creux.

In early 2024, she crossed the North Atlantic on a container ship as part of a residency with the Villa Albertine, making the documentary film TONNES. Since then, she has embarked on an investigation and research project into maritime transport in the Mediterranean.

She has published in the magazines Décor (ENSAD & Presses du Réel), A°2021 (École Urbaine de Lyon), Azimuts #54 (Cité du design - Saint-Étienne), Issue #12 (HEAD - Geneva), States #3 (Villa Albertine). She is regularly invited to present her work at conferences. ENSA Limoges, ESA Saint-Luc, EESAB Brest, ENSA Dijon, ISDAT Toulouse, EBABX, ESADTPM and Université Panthéon-Sorbonne have all called on her to run workshops for their students.