For the exhibition-residency “Chemin creux” (Hollow way), the designer Mathilde Pellé has chosen to continue her “Soustraire” (Subtract) research approach and invites us to rethink our relationship with material and our ways of living and consuming, in contrast to the exponential growth of goods. By extending her practice of dissecting and removing material from everyday objects, she offers us the opportunity to experience the ruin of domestic environments through subtraction. Questioning our obsession with accumulation, her radical approach seeks to bring forth new forms and to examine our uses by revaluing emptiness.

Thus, following her project “Subtractive House” project, she attempts to develop and prototype new everyday objects (a knife, a shelf, and a mirror), which have been stripped of 2/3 of their material. With this work, Mathilde Pellé questions our subtractive common sense and raises an essential question: Why is there something rather than less?