SCREEN: Harvesting The Summer by Mathilde Rosier

August 4 – 26, 2020

Mathilde Rosier

Harvesting The Summer (2019-2020)
HD video , 16 min, courtesy Mathilde Rosier

Selected by Elise Lammer

Harvesting the Summer is one of Mathilde Rosier’s most recent works. Taking the form of a diary, this collection of voice notes is also a work-in-progress or evolutive work that deals with humans’ relationship to Nature. The story is told in voiceover by the artist herself, who uses a very soft and hypnotic tone to emphasise the ritualistic quality of the work.

To the artist, alienation and destruction are symptoms of the liberal society, and in order to overcome it, one should be able to dismantle the nature vs. culture divide. Resulting in centuries of abusive agriculture such divide not only destroyed the natural environment, but also the original connexion between men and earth. Inviting her listeners to take the matter in their hands, she suggests that through simple rituals performed in Nature, one could reconnect or re-integrate it. We see the artist performing a “Field Dance” a ritual including a series of subtle and repetitive movements, including caressing the crops in a circular motion or stepping barefoot on cultivated soil. The video includes sequences of the artist drawing and painting outdoor and documents moments of creating inside her studio, which is located in her home, in the French countryside. It’s alternating with images of drawings and paintings from a series of works depicting chimeric creatures that associate features from plants, humans, and animals, most notably a hybrid figure composed of the body of a human and the head of a corncob.

The works of Mathilde Rosier draw on her interest in the physical and psychological experience of ancient rites and rituals. In 2012, she received a Fellowship from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with which she did anthropological research about the groups who practice magic in present-day western society. Her art often embodies fictional offshoots or parts of a narrative, where constellations of self-made costumes, mystic representations of animals, and nature often seem like props, an abandoned stage set, or solitary protagonists of an unfamiliar yet compelling reality. Through the combination of painting, film, dance, and theatre, Rosier constructs oneiric situations that allow the beholder to lose any sense of space and time, opening a portal between conscious and unconscious realms.

Mathilde Rosier lives in Burgundy, France. Solo exhibitions and performances have been shown at Camden Arts Center London; Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach; Serpentine Gallery London; Kunstverein Hannover; Musée du Jeu de Paume Paris. Group exhibitions include Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Galleria de Arte Moderno, Milan; Kunsthaus, Graz; Abteiberg Museum, Moenchengladbach; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Kunsthalle Baden-Baden.

Mathilde Rosier, Harvesting The Summer (2019-2020), HD video , 16 min, courtesy Mathilde Rosier (video still)