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Émilie RENARD & Mathis COLLINS
Les faiblesses de l’art et de la magie

Laureates of the “European Chronicles” open call  for a research and production residency 2019 – 2020, launched by Fondation Thalie in partnership with the Hippocrène Foundation and the Camargo Foundation.

The research of Mathis Collins (FR) and Émilie Renard (FR) takes root in the street theater that was invented at fairs, in Paris at the end of the 17th century, in the heart of rivalries between the Comédie Française alias “la troupe du Roi” Louis XIV who attributes to him the monopoly of the dialogue and the Commedia dell’arte dissident, which renews the dialogical forms by defying the censorship of state. These differences between a centralized, elitist culture and a multitude of vernacular proto-countercultures are for them iconographic, narrative and methodological resources for observing participatory artistic practices, both those framed by artistic education policies and those that come from co-creation practices where a group, united by common circumstances, does collective work. Their cross-disciplinary, cross-historical and cross-European investigations will take the form of a tangle of stories, transcribed in an edition as well as in the exhibition Mime by Mathis Collins and Paul Collins of which Émilie Renard is the curator, at the La Criée art center in Rennes, in the fall of 2020.


Born in 1986 in Paris, Mathis Collins completed his art studies between Cergy, Metz, Montreal and Brussels before participating in Open School East in London. Franco-Canadian sculptor and performer, he organizes collective workshops and public events around popular and grotesque craft objects or practices that try to rethink the modes of exhibition of popular arts. The subjects and materials explored in his work range from the harvest of the cork oak to the ornamentation of a bottle of alcohol, from the coffee table to the clown’s shoe, from the polychrome bas-reliefs to the Poulbots de Paris, from the caricature of the Second Empire to contemporary experimental artistic education methodologies. His works have been shown at the Palais de Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, the Lafayette Anticipations Foundation, the Friche Belle de Mai, the Riijksakademie in Amsterdam, 1m3 Lausanne and Longtang Zürich. He is represented by the Crèvecoeur gallery. Her next exhibition will be held at 15 Orient (New York) in April 2020.

Curator and author since 2000, Émilie Renard, born in 1976, lives, works in Paris. His research axis is based on the power of art to act within the structures of the imaginary, betting on the power of the experience of art to transform personal perceptions and collective representations. She directed the art center, La Galerie, in Noisy-le-Sec from 2012 to 2018. In an institutional context, she sought to make the art center program a lever to act on aesthetic, social relationships and symbolic between the people who animate it: artists, teams, audiences, partners. From an intersectional feminist perspective, she is attentive to the power structures that distribute roles and divide practices, seeking to link what is separate within and around art practices: the work of art and its administration, majority states and minority states. Other facts: from 2002 to 2010, she was co-editor of the journal Trouble. In 2008 and 2009, she conducted multifaceted research on the resurgence of the Arcadian myth, with a symposium / festival at ESAD Saint-Etienne and in the online review rosab.net # 2 published by CAPC, Bordeaux.