REYNAUD Mathilde

Interview by Fanny Bauguil (VIDEOFORMES relay teacher) and Manon Derobert (VIDEOFORMES communications manager)

• How would you describe this installation? What do we see? What do we hear? What do we do?

The installation consists of a 13-minute color film. It’s a digitized file of a 16mm film.

• What’s it about?

In a suspended atmosphere, two naturalists observe the plant world in the digital age. They suggest the stories of 19th-century English and American botanists. They tell the story of these emancipated women, past and future.

Their dialogues, born of the study of plants, intertwine with the technical language of 3D software practice, bringing out a shared sensibility between these scientific and digital practices, under the banner of feminist empowerment.

In the course of their exchanges, Matilda 1 and Matilda 2 are contaminated by a green fluidity in their thoughts. Guided to the depths of the swamp by computer-generated images, they melt their bodies into a strange, luminescent environment.

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Lemna is an experimental short film that brings together scientific observation and the practice of 3D modeling, weaving nature, ecosystems, feminism and otherness into a poetic collusion.

It explores the nature of CGI, establishing a dialogue between the observational practice of naturalists and contemporary 3D modeling. In a suspended atmosphere, two naturalists observe the plant world in the digital age. They suggest the story of 19th-century English and American botanists who redefined the observation of living things through an approach that is both scientific and poetic. They tell the story of these emancipated women, past and future.

The film features two actresses named Matilda, in reference to the Matilda effect, the invisibility of women in science. Their journey gradually plunges them into a marsh landscape, an ecosystem that embodies the transition between different environments, with which they end up merging.

As they observe and interact with the plants, a transformation takes place, suggesting a more intimate, symbiotic relationship with the living. By developing an approach that makes room for otherness, these women have developed a vision that enables the living to be more than just the backdrop to our lives. They have sought ways of existing and cohabiting with these forms of life. What’s more, it becomes possible “to enter into a relationship with them, insofar as they share with us a common time and territory – a common life ”1.

The film illustrates this openness to otherness, this ability to observe and understand living things differently. It’s an approach that, through a fine-tuned understanding of otherness, enables us to project ourselves into the eyes of these life forms and perceive their environment through their point of view. From this perspective, the damp, dark environment of the marsh, for example, becomes so attractive to them.

Their explorations are reflected in the evolution of light in the film: the light starts out bright and clear, then evolves into a golden hour as they study more deeply
the structure of the plants, and finally to a blue hour when they adopt the ferns’ point of view and choose to immerse themselves in this watery ecosystem. The actresses’ bodies also become blurred during the final dialogue, to accompany their transformation and fusion with the surrounding vegetation.

Their dialogues, born of the study of plants, blend with the technical language of 3D modeling, creating a shared sensibility between these scientific and digital practices, under the banner of feminist empowerment.

The film’s final image symbolizes the contamination of the human body by ferns. The 3D computer-generated image suggests forms in the making, in constant mutation: regeneration, branching development and possible hybridization. This evokes a metamorphosis of the human being towards other futures, in a world where humans and nature redefine themselves together.

The title, Lemna, evokes the duckweed, which becomes a central symbol, linking the history of the group, the transmission of experience and sisterhood between the women.

Echoing an imaginary that calls out to women through scientific, naturalist and digital history (where their places are still precarious), is also “to give visibility to this lineage of women, to contribute to activating the possibility for women today to seize more willingly this practice and this relationship to the living ”2.

By bringing together the perspectives of naturalists and those of digital creation through a non-anthropocentric vision, Lemna redefines the imaginaries linked to nature and technology.

1, 2. Estelle Zhong Mengual, Apprendre à voir : le point de vue du vivant, Éditions Actes Sud, Arles, France, June 2021

• Is this the first time this installation has been presented to the public? Can you tell us a little about the process involved in creating the work?

Lemna has already been presented at the Panorama 25 exhibition at Le Fresnoy – Studio National des arts contemporains (Tourcoing), at Pléiades 2024 (Saint-Étienne), at the Afropixel 2024 festival (Dakar), and at the Labocine online Science New Wave Festival 2024.

To develop this work, I went through the classic phases of film production in France. First, I wrote a synopsis, along with the dialogues. With a set designer, we designed the sets, which we then built on a film set. I then set up a shoot with a crew (cinematographer, assistant director, camera assistant, gaffer, etc.). I created most of the 3D scenes, with the help (for three scenes) of a VFX graphic artist. I then edited the film with an editor. The sound part began at the end of the editing process, with the creation of the film’s soundscapes, sound effects and sound design (the music you hear during the film). At the end of all these stages, we kinescoped the film: using a 16mm film camera, we filmed a screen showing the film, in order to obtain the grainy look of the film and blend the 3D and real images. The final two stages in the production process are color grading and film mixing.

• Which artists (in all fields) or, more generally, which art forms feed your creative process, and what references, if any, do you allude to in this installation?

The major theoretical references that nourished the film are Donna Haraway, Ursula Le Guin for their vision of the way we make fiction, Iris Brey on the construction of the female gaze in cinema and the image, and Estelle Zhong Mengual, who was a major reference for this project, as I was able to discover the practice of 19th-century English and American women naturalists. Finally, the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, who talks about how you can approach bryology and take an interest in different plant species while summoning up a gaze that is not that of the white, imperialist West.

The artistic references for this project were fuelled by the work of Sophia Oppel, who does some very interesting work on sound text. In relation to the text, there’s also the opera Einstein on the Beach by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, which presents a relationship to the construction of the English language and to a highly poetic grammatical form. I’m also thinking of the video work of Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni, and that of Sabrina Ratté.

• What difficulties, constraints, challenges… did you encounter in the making of the film?

Creating the film’s environment and sets was particularly difficult. We had to find an atmosphere that echoed nature, but also made reference to virtual environments (video games, etc.) and the green screen, to evoke our relationship with nature, which is also artificial, without clashing with the images of nature created in 3D. This was one of the key themes of the film: to talk about my view of vegetation and the very detailed study of leaf and flower textures that I carry out to be able to create them in 3D. Following in the footsteps of 19th-century English and American women naturalists, this practice has brought me much closer to the living and helped me understand other forms of otherness. In the film, digital images become a visual element that gradually contaminates the thinking of the two naturalists, leading them to merge with “real” nature.

• Can you give us one or more web addresses where we can see your work?

https://www.mathildereynaud.com/allprojets/lemna

A few keywords that would fit in well with your installation?
3D, plants, vegetation, otherness, feminism, “female gaze”, woman behind the camera, ecofeminism.

• A few words about your artistic career? When did you first become interested in digital art? Do you manage to make a living from your creative activity?

I began my artistic career at the Saint-Étienne art faculty, where I took my first programming course. I then became interested in self-taught 3D computer graphics. It was at the École d’art et de design de Saint-Étienne that I was able to pursue this practice and explore the different mediums that stem from it, such as video, video games and so on. It was a turning point in my practice to discover digital art and the issues it raises. I always approach it as a form of empowerment, with a feminist outlook that is never frontal, but permeates the projects I carry out.

For the moment, I can’t make a living from it, but I’m managing to find work creating 3D computer graphics for other artistic projects, notably films.