1 April 2025-1 March 2026
Hélène Matte – Artiste assignée à résidence 2025-2026 – Diogène et Sisyphe
Artiste assigné.e à résidence is an initiative that takes shape over 12 months, during which an artist is invited to deliver his or her own interpretation of our theme. For 2025-2026, Hélène Matte explores the theme Keep this door closed. through an intimate artistic dialogue with her father. Here, however, it’s not a question of closing the door on what’s disturbing: on the contrary, Hélène chooses to open it wide to shed light on her father’s unique universe, with him. Her Diogenes and Sisyphus project tackles the themes of aging, accumulation and family ties with sensitivity and acuity.
Diogène et Sisyphe – A duo residency between memory, creation and transmission
With Diogène et Sisyphe, Hélène Matte offers an artistic immersion into the inner worlds of her father, a man whose home is as overflowing as his imagination. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic in the 1980s, he nevertheless escaped psychiatric institutions, embracing a free and assumed marginality. Today, he embodies a figure both elusive and endearing, oscillating between extreme mistrust and overflowing affection.
You can follow this project, which will take the form of a residency diary, here and on our social networks :
April 2025
Hélène devoted her first month of residency, among other things, to deepening her knowledge of the character she attributes to herself: Sisyphus. She laid out her research and reflections on six pages in the image of her mind: learned, frenetic, sprawling and surprisingly sensible. We’ve chosen to share extracts from this text in order to create an intimate portrait of the characters at the heart of the story that will be written throughout the residency: Hélène, Robert and the third entity, their relationship.
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HÉLÈNE MATTE
An indisciplinary artist, Hélène Matte combines her approaches to writing, image and gesture according to occasion and context. Her work is both local and international, intimate and social. An artist and cultural worker for over twenty years, she has staged exhibitions and performances in Europe, Canada and elsewhere in the Americas. In Quebec City, she is multiplying her original and unifying projects. Long associated with the community and socially committed, she has developed a unique expertise in cultural mediation by setting up projects such as Apprentis poètes! (Le Pignon Bleu – La maison pour grandir 2011; Planète Rebelle, 2013); Vies de Quartier and Les Arbres à poèmes (Maison de la littérature, 2016 and 2018); Une Babel de pierres vives (Avatar, Carrefour des enfants Saint-Malo, 2018; Planète Rebelle, 2019); the Pavois poetry workshops (Sherpa and éditions Hybride, 2019); and more. Hélène Matte has published several collections of poetry. She has over thirty short films to her credit as producer, director and poet-narrator. Many of these have been screened at international festivals and won awards and mentions.
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This project is supported by VITAM – Centre de recherche en santé durable.
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