Mathilde Dewavrin

Research Project

Chimeric Citadel, creating a sentinel art

Project Abstract

What do we want to say about the places we pass through? How do we name them? Who inhabits the space where I place my feet, where I look, where I dip my fingers? These are the questions that the project Chimeric Citadel aims to answer.

The purpose of the project is to create an alternative cartography of the Citadelle, including sensitive and scientific information combined in text, drawings and textures, to be used to (re)discover the Citadelle. The idea is to knit together human and non-human stories to create new imaginary worlds, firmly rooted in their territory.

The project will be presented to the public in the form of a storytelling walk, where participants will spend an evening wandering through imaginary territories.
The project is divided into three phases. In the first phase, known as the harvesting phase, the creator explores the territory, accompanied by participants, in search of stories, data, opinions, myths and so on, which are then recorded as raw material for creative work.

For the second phase, using my architectural tools, the collected stories are mapped out. The stories are deliberately anonymized and the subjects sometimes left ambiguous : is the narrator a bee? Is the monster described here a rock? The work of rewriting and graphic design is approached simultaneously, interweaving the concrete and the abstract. Workshops are then held to create one or more maps, tracing out routes to raise awareness of the issue of living things in the Citadelle and the surrounding area.

The final stage is a series of imaginative and reflective walks. The chimerical walks are punctuated by interventions aimed sometimes at opening up visions of possible and/or utopian futures, sometimes at providing tools for understanding the space developing before our eyes.

Chimeric Citadel is a project that considers the living and the question of habitat as primary in the spaces we pass through on a daily basis. The project is intended to be timeless and therefore evolving. It constitutes an initial set of tools and thematic routes to familiarise ourselves with the Citadelle and make it our own, but it would be entirely possible for other contributors, artists or scientists, to add to it. It could also evolve, because the process put in place at the Citadelle of Marseille could be echoed in the Vauban citadels of the Rhône valley, creating an archipelago of Sentinels of the Living, witnesses to the past and future transformations that our ecosystems are undergoing, understood in the broadest sense of the term (political, sociological, ecological, etc.).

Transdisciplinarity and broader perspective

Chimeric Citadel is being developed as part of the “Utopian viewpoints on Marseilles” call for projects, and its form responds to the very specific case of the Marseilles Citadel, which is the subject of Mathilde’s research. Developed for this call for residencies, the proposed project, although part of a wider research approach, can only be carried out on site and in close partnership with researchers from the Aix-Marseille academy. Local scientific expertise is an integral part of the project.

The very production of the artistic project is carried out, at pivotal moments, hand in hand with the people already involved in the citadel project. The participation of actors from public life in the area around the Citadel is also desirable.

The issue of reclaiming space is central to the creator’s work, and transdisciplinarity is her favorite tool. So here she wants to seize the opportunity to open up the boundary between artistic practice and scientific reasoning, to encourage a reconsideration of the places we inhabit. Her artistic practice is rooted in and inseparable from the places in which and for which she creates. In this sense, her projects are tailored to specific spaces, with the aim of always contributing to these spaces and their inhabitants, both human and non-human.

Biography

An artist-architect with a transdisciplinary practice, Mathilde Dewavrin hones her knowledge as an architect into tools dedicated to an inclusive, social and respectful practice. Participatory construction, collective writing processes and performances in the public space are the ingredients she uses to create utopian possibilities around the reappropriation of space.

Mathilde was born and grew up in Marseille. She chose to leave her home town to explore other spaces, but also to take a more detached, analytical look at the city. After studying architecture at ENSA Paris-Val-de-Seine, where she received the jury’s congratulations for her master’s project developed with Eva Feuillard in 2017, she moved to Berlin. During her studies, she spent a year studying in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a rich human, cultural and ecological experience that gave her a fresh perspective. Her decision to live in Berlin is the result of this experience, and her exposure to a different culture has enabled her to deepen her knowledge of France’s Germanic neighbors. She worked in international architecture agencies for several years until she became a member of the German Order of Architects. She then chose to leave the classic architect’s circuit and fully explore transdisciplinary practices, influenced in particular by her growing interest in theater. As an artist-architect, she reconnects with the materiality of construction by working with wood. She builds in public spaces, in a participatory or performative way, always with the idea of breaking down the boundaries between theater, architecture, art and sociology. Using these tools, she seeks to bring out visions of multiple new futures in everyone.

She likes to think that her different experiences always feed off each other, which is one of the reasons why in 2019 she co-created Collectif Trouble, a transdisciplinary collective with a focus on theater and the performing arts. In 2021, she will co-create the B.U.I.L.D.*lab collective, Building Unique Interconnected Loving Dimensions, with which the act of building takes on the significance of transmitting knowledge and reappropriating spaces by dominated beings. Construction is performative, educational and, above all, a sociological experience.