Les commissaires anonymes
Unity of artistic research and action
Cécile Roche Boutin, curator and designer, and Mathilde Sauzet Mattei, curator and artist, make up Les commissaires anonymes (*The anonymous curators), combining artistic research and action. The research takes different forms including publications, exhibitions, workshops and performances, and is focused on the experiences and representations of a possible collective subjectivity.
Involved in art and design networks, Les commissaires anonymes work on issues of individual and collective emancipation, on the role of artistic practices in social and entrepreneurial innovation, on the place of abstract langagues in political thinking, and on the necessity of experimental processes and critical measures in cultural production.
In this approach, the curator is envisaged as an author and mediator of language : Cécile Roche Boutin and Mathilde Sauzet Mattei play the role of the interface, practically and theoretically, between the different stakeholders of an artistic project, with political and social dimensions. For each context, they create the conditions for a dialogue in which the presence (or the implication) of art enriches the issues and reactions to a given situation.
Living in Paris and Bruxelles, Les commissaires anonymes have been involved in the artistic team of Michelangelo Pistoletto for the Biennale Evento (Bordeaux, 2011), they have collaborated with the galleries XPO (Paris, 2012) and Eva Meyer (Paris, 2013) and with the programme Nouvelles Vagues/dans Paris organized by the Palais de Tokyo (2013). In 2014, Cécile Roche Boutin and Mathilde Sauzet Mattei were part of the artistic board of Poppositions Off Fair, the alternative fair of Art Brussels, with whom they realized the exhibition Do you have barbaric tastes ? (2015) with five belgian collectors. In the context of the European Capital of Culture 2015 in Mons, Les commissaires anonymes worked with the network of architects and designers ConstructLab for Mons invisible, a temporary residency for artistic and citizen experimentation on the rooftop of a former military site. Cécile Roche Boutin et Mathilde Sauzet Mattei have been regularly involved in the interventions of Passage Management, a consulting firm, and collaborate today with Co-design it !, a collective of collaborative design for business and institutions.
At the same time they publish standalone texts and articles in collective editions and web magazines such as Strabic.fr or Mouvement.net, and they develop edited volumes, their first book Eldorado Maximum, new typology of contemporary eldorados was published in May 2015 and the second one L’île des réunions (The island of meetings), a methodology of collaborative meetings for an affirmative approach of uncertainty in June 2016.
Cécile Roche Boutin (FR, 1987) is a graduate of a MFA of Scenography & public spaces at the Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin of Strasbourg (HEAR, France, 2012)nd of a Master of sociology of cultural practices at the University of Nanterre-Paris X (Nanterre, France, 2013). Since 2013, Cécile Roche Boutin has developed with the consulting agency Passage Management working skills and tools in the design and facilitation of creative processes. She has recently joined le collective Codesign-it ! in which she collaborates on projects developing critical methodologies and an experimental framework for companies and institutions.
Mathilde Sauzet Mattei (FR, 1987) is a graduate of a MFA of Scenography & public spaces at the Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin of Strasbourg (HEAR, France, 2012) and of a MA Art Research & Praxis of the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem
(DAI, Netherlands, 2016). She is author of several articles for magazines and collective volumes and she develops the book publishing arm for Les commissaires anonymes. She envisages her writing work as an experimental support of voice, speeches and performances. In 2014, she received the grant of the Christophe Merian Fondation/Basel for the residency programm of the Atelier Mondiale (Belgique, 2014).