Mathilde Lavenne
Focus on Infinity - Film - 15min - 2015
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 17
A Ferry leaves us at the foot of snowy mountains and leads us to the heart of a glacier where the magnetic field seems to reverse the perception of time. Hypnotic, kaleidoscopic, shamanic, Focus On Infinity explores the creative power in each tiny part of humanity. This sensorial exhibition in the form of a fjord-movie reminds us that Lavoisier’s thought, too, is infinite: nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed. Geoffrey Sebille
“ (...) The mountain depopulates space. It alone engraves – in its time and at its hour – the lines of appearance, the drawing of appearance, its flows and its freezes, its diaphanous concretions and its emptiness with barely a human or animal face, following the height of its viewpoint: it details what is infinite within it, not at every moment, but in the tireless diffraction of the moments that are composed and dissolved by day and by night, on the rock in fragments, drips and reflective crystallisations, under the snow or under the moss haunted by secret transparencies. (…) Constraining the person who films it – this infinite splendour – to stand at a single waiting point, locating themselves there between the going and the return, knowing now that they will never stop coming back towards it, spacing out its approaches: a pact that tears apart yet cannot be torn asunder, from which all sources are transformed into images. At first approach an endless chord. On the first return, an adventure without reverse”.
Excerpt from ABORDS, Daniel Dobbels
Mathilde Lavenne
After initially focusing her artistic practice on drawing, in 2011 she directed her approach more towards new technology and digital tools with the directing of animation film and interactive installations. In the same way as archaeology draws as much on Earth science as the Natural and Social sciences, Mathilde Lavenne approaches the notion of journey in terms of excavation, matter and error. Whatever the medium, she questions the turmoil that stirs us to descend the strata of the earth to discover our individual history.
After a Master's degree in Arts and Culture, she obtained a DNSEP with distinction from the School of Fine Arts in Tourcoing and a Post-graduate diploma from the Decorative arts school in Strasbourg.
She was awarded the Pierre Schaeffer 'brouillon d'un rêve' prize in 2014. Her works have been shown in major exhibitions and numerous festivals such as the Salon de Montrouge, the Tampere Film festival in Finland, the Internationale Kurzfilmwoche Regensburg in Germany, at the Cité de l'architecture & du patrimoine de la Ville de Paris, etc.
In October 2014 she joined the Alain Resnais class of Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains in Tourcoing.
