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Matiere Noire is a Paris-based creative studio leading new approaches to spatial design. Built on a network of parallel disciplines, our operation cultivates ambivalence, using observational methods to ground its intuitive impulses. Matiere Noire is driven by an appetite for the undefined, the hypothetical, the intangible. Its process celebrates unexpected derivations, developing them into bespoke applications of cross-cultural collaboration.

20 rue Saint Sauveur 75002
+33 9 70 66 95 66
contact@matiere-noire.paris
recruitment@matiere-noire.paris

Spatial design
Light design
Scenography

For the release of her ninth studio album XXXXX, Arca commissions Matiere Noire to build a mobile scenography for Diva.Experimental, a livestreamed improvisation directed by Daniel Sannwald and staged inside an abandoned factory on the outskirts of Barcelona. Rather than fixing light and camera to the architecture, Matière Noire mounts them onto a fleet of trucks and a lighting drone, letting the entire apparatus travel through the space alongside the performance. The drone hovers over the concrete shell like a surveillance craft or a blinding UFO, casting a searching, dystopian spotlight on the artist and the structure alike, while the trucks trace 360-degree vantage points around her. Every tool of the production becomes a vehicle, every image an on-the-go composition - a mechanical fleet made permeable to the body it follows, blurring the line between the machine that records and the performer it chases.