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“Living in the forest” Exhibition by Mathilde Nicol

October 19 @ 14h00 - November 30 @ 17h00

3€
centre d'art contemporain de châteauvert

Exhibition of 19 October to 30 November 2025

Mezzanine exhibition

The Living in the Forest exhibition presents the research and productions carried out by Mathilde Nicol during her Rouverture le Monde residency at the Pourcieux leisure center, as well as the works created at the end of this experience.
Graduate of Fine Arts from Marseille, Mathilde Nicol develops a practice of artistic ethnography, where the observation of ecosystems and human encounters are central. With a sensitive and poetic approach, it explores the links between living beings, plants and mushrooms, while questioning
the transformations that human activity imposes on natural environments. In Pourcieux, she invited the children to venture into the forest, to harvest, observer, invent and build together a fabric cabin in the heart of the woods, thus transforming a space often perceived as “outside” into a real shared living space.
Reopen the World, A DRAC PACA device, As part of cultural summer 2024 set up by the Ministry of Culture.

 

Living in the forest :

Before venturing into the woods, we had to inquire about the hunter program. Could we live in the forest that week?, or would it remain the dangerous space where hunting is practiced ?
Ici, hunting takes place on weekends, the hunter told us on the phone. SO, with the twenty children from the leisure center and Marjorie the facilitator, we established our base camp in the forest. During this Reopen the world, we co-built our fabric cabin in the middle of the trees. We became a group – attentive and creative entity – through games, by walking, and by silence as well as by cries. We created our own television “TV-mushroom, the teleche of the children of the forest ». There were times of harvest and observations, pretext for an introduction to photography and mycology. Every evening we came home with our clothes full of stains and our heads full of wild adventures..

At the end of this week, as I began a few days of artistic research in the gîte’s workshop, I was thinking that living in the forest with the children had been like a space-time journey. I thus began to imagine elements composing the decor of this trip. Among them, stones connected together two by two, by weaving in linen thread, became more easily transportable during the journey, textile forms stuffed with dead leaves reminiscent of cushions were conducive to rest, and a sculpture in wood and woven linen thread evoking a piece of furniture with an abstract use, prefigured without precision an artisanal practice discovered during this imaginary journey. According to my research, I also met a mushroom monster, who had a mycological glossary coming out of his mouth.

Between fiction and reality, the work carried out during this residency explores the forest as a habitat and way of life.

 

Details

Start:
October 19 @ 14h00
End:
November 30 @ 17h00
Cost:
3€
Event Categories:
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Place

Centre d’Art contemporain de Chateauvert