After studying philosophy and Latin American cultures, she studied glass, ceramics and drawing at the HEAR, Haute école des arts du Rhin in Strasbourg, and then developed her attention to materials through video art, cinema, digital art and sound at the Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains.
Among the motifs that mark out her production, the ghost - hidden or silent stories, resurgences of forms in the dark - reveals forms of animism, beliefs and magic of the territories she probes, from Norway to Mexico, from Poland to Argentina, and gives voice to the living people who inhabit them in an approach that borrows from a kind of synesthetic hypertrophy given to the landscape, as in her first film Focus On Infinity, as well as from ethnographic analysis - fieldwork, interviews, meetings with experts. The journey, and the displacement that it applies to the body and the gaze, is the active principle if not the methodological continuum of Mathilde Lavenne who relies on the serendipity of encounters to act the passage of the nebula of 360° research (literature, philosophy, history of science and technology...) to the final form of a film or an installation.
"To be separated from nature in order to understand it" a formula pronounced by a physicist in the film Solar, is perhaps the keystone of Mathilde Lavenne's work and a key to understanding her use of capture technologies that let reality link itself, contaminate the image, distend its potentials and lead to new filmic vocabularies.
Her work has been selected in many international festivals, including the International Film Festival of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, the Tampere Film Festival in Finland, the International Short Film Festival of Uppsala in Sweden. Finalist of the G2 Green Earth Festival in Venice, California, she was awarded the Best Experimental Short Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival (USA). In 2018, she received the Golden Nica Award from the Ars Electronica International Festival, Austria, before joining the Casa de Velazquez, Academy of France in Madrid.
