Mathilde Renault x Pedro Matias

Dear friends, collaborators and colleagues,

I’m excited to share my work with you through a new channel this year. I’ve been thinking about this newsletter for a while, especially as I gradually stepped back from social media to re-evaluate what kind of presence feels sustainable and meaningful to me. 

Besides sharing things in finished stages, I’d like to create space for context, process, and reflection. I’ll give updates about my work, the training and collaborations I’m involved in, upcoming exhibitions or grants I’ve been fortunate to receive, alongside subtle shifts shaping my practice more quietly in the background.

I’d like to dedicate this first newsletter to my on-going collaboration with Pedro Matias, Tatiana Rosa and Paula Garcia Sans since 2021. One of the projects we are currently working on is In the Crust of My Feelings – our first interactive installation. I’m personally involved with the interactive film, which explores an interesting emotion to translate : the feeling of resentment. This fourth chapter is joined by Emma van der Berg and continues an ongoing series of multimedia installations which builds on the entanglement of human and non-human ecologies. Each work develops a different facet of these interdependencies through transformation, accumulation, states of emergency, and care.

This new installation approaches the human body and natural environments as co-dysregulated ecosystems, operating beyond sustainable thresholds of regulation. Marked by saturation, erosion, and failed containment,  these porous systems absorb more than they can metabolise. Climate change and temperature anomalies enter the work not as representation or data, but as an invisible pressure enabled by the audience, destabilising rhythm, coherence, and spatial orientation. The installation frames collapse, instability, and non-resolution as a persistent mode of coexistence – which may resonate with many of us for a while now.

A preview of In the Crust of My Feelings will be shown at CBK Zuidoost in March 2026. The full-scale installation will take place in Dokzaal later in May, and will be activated by a performance from Tatiana Rosa and Laura Nygren. I’ll share more details with you closer to the dates. 

Also, in Rotterdam this spring, Dépaysement will be shown for a second time at Brutus, from March 25 until June 17. Feel free to come by!

This third multimedia iteration delves into displacement, estrangement, and the feeling of no-longer belonging. In the two-channel installation, digital images 3D-scanned from natural ecologies intertwine with the sculptural work they inspire, drawing viewers into a shifting, immersive world. The soundscape, created by Tatiana Rosa, translates the sculptures’ surrounding colors into subtle movements and gestures. These gestures echo the ever-growing number of extinct species, while a polyvocal voice-over merges multiple presences into a communal voice – neither here nor there, yet always felt.

This chapter invites audiences into a post-natural “cave of desires”, where human and more-than-human landscapes intertwine in vulnerable ways. The work draws parallels between labouring bodies, coral reefs at risk from bleaching, systemic anxiety, and pandemic-era touch deprivation. Sculptural ecosystems, immersive soundscapes, moving images, and tactile surfaces dissolve linear narratives into fractal, disorienting encounters. The multi-sensory installation transforms ecological awareness into a deeply felt, relational experience, where care and connection emerge as vital practices.

The first chapter of an essayistic, documentary-style inquiry maps micro-bodily landscapes as living, responsive subjectivities. It proposes the body as shaped by the same forces that sculpt natural environments — rhythm, growth, erosion, and regeneration — and suggests that shifts in landscape are inseparable from shifts in sensation, emotion, and perception. Human and natural topographies emerge as interdependent systems of adaptation, attuned to ecological and affective transformation.

I’d like to end by thanking you for being here and showing interest in my practice – it means a lot. I look forward to seeing you in physical form, at one of the events or in real life. And to those concerned, I wish you the best of luck during this season of open calls and grant proposals. 

Until soon.

Mathilde