Hermes, Mystery at the Grooms

Mystery at the Grooms’ is a theatrical, immersive pop-up by Matiere Noire for Hermès that transforms spaces in Shanghai, New York, Tokyo, Singapore and Paris into a full-scale dreamworld.

Equal parts escape room, equestrian fantasy, and retail reverie, the playful and interactive experience invites visitors to step into a theatrical, gamified installation designed as an equestrian-type boarding school where horses go missing. Visitors use their quick wits and ingenuity to find clues and solve a mystery as they move through a series of elaborately designed rooms built around Hermès objects.

The rooms unfold like a storyboard in motion, each one saturated in color and coded with clues. In the red-walled Head Groom’s Office, a wall of saddles doubles as sculpture while a painting on the wall swings open to reveal a hidden passage. The laundry is a Pop Art fever dream: checkerboard floors, mechanical shirt racks, and washing machines filled with silk scarves and leather goods, all monitored by grooms in top hats pressing linens with comic severity. The pantry is a stage set of hay bales and produce crates, heaped high with Hermès bags and gear – plus a bounty of oversized carrots, nodding cheekily to the missing horses. In the refectory, an extravagant table is set for a surreal banquet: gleaming porcelain, citrus and cabbages in high towers, and framed silk carré-like icons on the walls.

Moncler, The City of Genius

Moncler’s City of Genius transformed Shanghai’s historic CSSC Pavilion into a 30,000-square-meter creative metropolis, where ten global visionaries debuted immersive ‘neighborhoods’ for over 8,000 guests and millions online. As part of this expansive collaborative landscape, Matiere Noire designed the lighting for two of the event’s most concept-driven pavilions: Rick Owens’s ‘Refuge’ and Hiroshi Fujiwara & Richard Wilson’s ‘Looking Glass.’

For Rick Owens, the studio enveloped a rugged stainless-steel mountain shelter in a dense atmospheric haze, cutting through it with graphic, diffused streaks of light that heightened the contrast between brutalist structure and dreamlike terrain.

For Hiroshi Fujiwara, Matière Noire adopted a radically reductive approach, shaping a contemplative ‘empty city’ around Richard Wilson’s reflective pool – an illusionistic surface that mirrored and distorted the space above.

Across both installations, Matiere Noire used light as a narrative force, helping define the emotional and perceptual backbone of Moncler’s temporary city of imagination.

Dior J’adore

For the expansive Dior J’adore retrospective at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, Matiere Noire partnered with Bureau Betak to shape the exhibition’s spatial and atmospheric identity. Their work positioned light not as illumination, but as a narrative device – guiding visitors through the fragrance’s history, craftsmanship, and evolving mythology.

Matiere Noire conceived a sequence of sensorial thresholds beginning with obscured hallways washed in complex top-light systems, creating a gentle disorientation that prepared visitors for the dreamlike logic of the exhibition.

Each subsequent room unfolded as a distinct atmospheric chapter tied to the genealogy of J’adore: a bespoke laboratory evoking perfumer’s craft through soft-box lighting; a regal alcove shimmering with the gold-plated ripples iconized by the fragrance’s campaigns; a flower hall suggesting the warmth and radiance of a summer day; and a fashion gallery where golden light traced the silhouettes of couture gowns, from archival pieces to contemporary creations.

James Turrell, Gagosian Gallery

For James Turrell’s ‘At One’ at Gagosian Le Bourget, Matiere Noire served as the quiet architectural intelligence beneath the exhibition’s extraordinary calm, translating Turrell’s lifelong pursuit of ‘the thingness of light’ into a fully coherent spatial experience.

Drawing on their deep connection to the artist’s minimalist legacy, the studio oversaw the exhibition’s execution from plan adaptations to prototyping and production, shaping an environment where light, architecture, and technology merge without visible seams.

Their scenic and technical direction created an organic workflow – fusing video systems, LED engineering, custom surfaces, and 3D-printed components – to preserve the atmospheric precision of Turrell’s Ganzfelds, Wedgeworks, and Glassworks.

Through Matiere Noire’s orchestration, the gallery becomes a vessel for perception itself: edges dissolve, depth blurs, and Turrell’s revelations of color and space unfold with the meditative clarity that has defined his practice for more than six decades.

Cartier

For the inauguration of Jean Nouvel’s new Fondation Cartier, Matiere Noire conceived the scenography and light design of a temporary pavilion installed on the Place du Palais Royal. Operating as both architectural preface and mediation device, the structure translates Nouvel’s principles of transparency, movement, and stratification into an immersive spatial language. Layered planes of glass, image, and text form a suspended narrative, guiding visitors through the site’s historical and conceptual foundations.

Matiere Noire’s lighting reveals the pavilion as a living framework, activating its translucent surfaces and shifting reflections throughout the day. The installation resists monumentality, instead embracing permeability and transition. Positioned between absence and arrival, it prepares visitors for the architecture to come. Through precise material and atmospheric interventions, Matiere Noire transforms the pavilion into a threshold – an ephemeral structure that holds memory, projection, and anticipation in delicate equilibrium.

Moncler 70th Anniversary Exhibition

For Moncler’s 70th anniversary, Matiere Noire shaped the ‘Extraordinary Expedition’ into an immersive, multisensory journey across New York, London, and Seoul. Their atmospheric design guided visitors from a white ‘basecamp’ entrance through the exhibition’s three key sections – Extraordinary Experience, Extraordinary Moments, and Extraordinary Designs – using light, space, and sensory cues to evoke the brand’s alpine origins.

Through layered projections, fog, and subtle lighting choreography, Matiere Noire transformed garments, archive boxes, and CGI topographies into sculptural, almost cinematic experiences. The studio’s approach heightened the interplay of past and present, linking Moncler’s historical artifacts, collaborative reinterpretations of the Maya 70 jacket, and digital elements like Antoni Tudisco’s NFTs into a cohesive narrative.

Every corridor, projection, and display was calibrated to immerse visitors in the sights, sounds, and smells of the mountains, reinforcing Moncler’s ethos of adventure, innovation, and craftsmanship. In Matiere Noire’s hands, the exhibition became a living landscape where heritage, creativity, and sensory storytelling converge.

Hublot, Watches and Wonders, Zurich

For the 2022 edition of the Watches & Wonders luxury watch fair in Geneva, Matiere Noire reshaped Hublot’s brand’s universe into an experiential landscape where horology, material innovation, and light speak a single visual language.

Invited to reinterpret Hublot’s architectural identity, the studio crafted an environment that treats the booth not as a trade-fair structure but as a sculptural instrument – one that reveals the brand’s obsessions through calibrated atmospheres. Their work bridged conceptual research with technical precision, guiding every layer of execution: spatial planning, prototyping, lighting architecture, kinetic elements, and the integration of multimedia narratives.

By orchestrating a choreography of reflections, gradients, and engineered shadows, Matiere Noire transformed Hublot’s signature materials (sapphire, ceramic, titanium) into sensorial fields that shift with the viewer’s movement. The result is an immersive pavilion that elevates watchmaking into an encounter with time itself, echoing the studio’s ongoing pursuit of environments where technology and perception align in a state of cultivated ambiguity.

Nike X 1017 ALYX 9SM

For the Nike x 1017 ALYX 9SM activation in Hong Kong, Matiere Noire shaped a scenographic system that fused industrial clarity with the restless, nomadic spirit at the core of the collaboration.

Working at the intersection of global athletic culture and Alyx’s gritty Americana references, the studio engineered a modular environment built entirely from lightweight aluminum – a structure conceived for rapid production, efficient transport, and seamless on-site assembly. This reductive architecture became both tool and atmosphere: a multi-purpose wall system that guided circulation, framed product narratives, and generated a cinematic rhythm across successive rooms.

Gilded surfaces and corridor-like halls echoed the surreal backstage of an amusement park, inviting guests into a world where function and theatricality overlapped. Overhead, LED screens introduced a language of visual excess, amplifying the project’s layered aesthetic and transforming the installation into a compact, mobile universe designed with precision, intention, and movement in mind.

Jacquemus, Paris Flagship Store

For Jacquemus’s Paris flagship store, Matiere Noire helped translate the brand’s sculptural minimalism into a spatial language grounded in precision, materiality and quiet theatricality.

Working closely with the Jacquemus studio, Matiere Noire developed technical strategies and architectural detailing that allowed the boutique’s bold, almost surreal forms to function as a retail environment without compromising their purity. The team oversaw key phases of prototyping, fabrication and integration, ensuring that the store’s monolithic volumes, soft curves and textural contrasts could be executed at scale with absolute fidelity. By synchronizing lighting, circulation and display systems within these sculptural geometries, Matiere Noire reinforced Jacquemus’s signature blend of Mediterranean warmth and contemporary clarity.

The result is an interior that feels both intimate and iconic – a meticulously engineered space in which everyday retail operations disappear behind an atmosphere of effortless simplicity, revealing the discipline and technical orchestration required to make such restraint possible.

Pol Taburet, Lafayette Anticipation

For ‘OPERA III: ZOO “The Day of Heaven and Hell’ at Lafayette Anticipation, Matiere Noire translated Pol Taburet’s haunting dreamscapes into a fully realized, immersive scenography.

Working within the institution’s naturally labyrinthine layout, the studio engineered a sequence of sharp thresholds that open onto rooms – almost mausoleums – where windows, moldings and curtains evoke fragments of domestic familiarity. Matiere Noire developed the spatial logic, technical protocols and production workflows that allowed these fictional architectures to materialize with precision, ensuring that primary colors, flattened perspectives and carefully calibrated lighting sustained the tension between private obsession and public encounter.

This framework became the stage for Taburet’s mythological opera: voodoo amulets, bronze-cast fountains, moon-faced masks and other charged objects positioned as ritual actors within the space. By aligning architectural intervention with atmospheric intent, Matiere Noire amplified the psychic vibrations at the core of Taburet’s work, creating an exhibition in which the space itself seems to breathe with the artist’s uncanny imagination.

Audemars Piguet x 1017 ALYX 9SM

For the Audemars Piguet x 1017 ALYX 9SM project, Matiere Noire orchestrated a spatial narrative that mirrored the technical rigor and refined aesthetic of the collaboration. The exhibition transformed the venue into a modular environment where industrial precision meets luxury minimalism, echoing Alyx’s streetwear ethos and Audemars Piguet’s horological mastery.

Matiere Noire’s design integrated custom-fabricated structures, adaptable lighting schemes, and choreographed circulation paths, guiding visitors through a series of vignettes that highlighted the synergy between watchmaking and fashion. Aluminum display systems, mirrored surfaces, and sculptural pedestals framed the watches as functional art objects, while LED accents punctuated the space, emphasizing texture, detail, and movement.

By overseeing prototyping, installation, and technical coordination, Matiere Noire ensured that each element, from material finish to spatial rhythm, supported a cohesive sensory experience. The resulting exhibition blurred the boundaries between boutique, gallery, and atelier, presenting the collaboration as both a mechanical and aesthetic dialogue, where time, craft, and design converge.

Moncler x Mercedes By Nigo

For the launch of the Mercedes G-Class Past II Future and Moncler x NIGO collection at Mercedes-Benz Manhattan, Matiere Noire transformed the iconic dealership into an immersive, cinematic environment. Their lighting design treated the G-Class as a sculptural centerpiece, highlighting its iconic lines and reflective surfaces while creating zones for contemplation.

Color-changing LEDs choreographed the evening – from cool automotive blues on arrival to warm amber tones during the dinner – linking vehicles, fashion, and space into a cohesive narrative. The dinner setting, enriched with metallic accents, golden vases, and motifs drawn from the car and collection, was illuminated to enhance the fusion of past, present, and future. From the elevator arrival to the evening meal, Matiere Noire’s atmospheric approach elevated the event, immersing guests in a sensorial world where automotive design, fashion, and culture converge.

Rains

Matiere Noire translated Rains’ functional ethos into a sculptural, immersive pop-up environment at Galeries Lafayette Paris Haussmann that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. The studio’s scenography and light design for the brand’s vitrines and pop-up store isolate meteorological phenomena, creating a poetic dialogue between fashion, technology, and nature.

A monolithic LED structure dominates the space, projecting an artificial cascade across an abstract, brutalist set, while a robotic system continuously clears misted glass to reveal the brand’s logo and weatherproof garments. Matiere Noire’s orchestration of light, movement, and materiality turns the display into a performative experience, where the audience witnesses the intersection of utility and spectacle.

By framing Rains’ products within this futuristic yet tactile universe, the studio emphasizes both the garments’ protective function and the elemental beauty of weather itself. The resulting environment immerses visitors in a world where fashion, technology, and climate converge in sensory and conceptual harmony.

Drumsheds Room Y

For ROOM Y at Drumsheds in London, Matiere Noire developed a scenography and lighting system that deconstructs the visual language of large-scale festivals into a dispersed architectural field. Fundamental stage elements—crash barriers, risers, and technical fixtures—are extracted from their functional roles and recomposed as a constellation of sculptural forms across the dance floor.

Unified through a precise formal vocabulary, these fragments operate as autonomous spatial markers, compressing the mechanics of performance into a series of micro-environments. Matiere Noire’s lighting design activates this fragmented terrain, isolating and reconnecting each element in shifting sequences of visibility and shadow. The result is a scenography defined not by a single stage, but by accumulation and repetition—a continuous spatial punctuation that dissolves hierarchies between performer, audience, and structure. Within this dense field, atmosphere emerges as a distributed condition, shaped as much by absence as by presence.

Pol Taburet, 36th Biennale of São Paulo

For the 36th Biennale of São Paulo, Matiere Noire translated Pol Taburet’s surreal, dreamlike canvases into a three-dimensional immersive environment that amplifies the artist’s mythological and domestic obsessions.

The studio designed the spatial layout to echo Taburet’s characteristic flattening of perspective and use of primary colors, creating a labyrinthine sequence of rooms and thresholds that guide visitors through his visual narrative. Each space was outfitted with meticulously crafted elements (windows, moldings, curtains, bronze-cast fountains, voodoo amulets, and moon-faced masks) turning the exhibition into a sculptural opera of objects drawn from Taburet’s universe.

Lighting and material choices were calibrated to heighten the tension between private intimacy and public display, emphasizing the theatricality inherent in the paintings. Through scenography, Matiere Noire enabled visitors to physically inhabit Taburet’s invented world, bridging painting, sculpture, and architecture in an experience that is at once uncanny, poetic, and immersive.

Lemaire, Nine Frames

Matiere Noire’s contribution to Lemaire’s ‘Nine Frames’ presentation transforms the brand’s Paris boutique into a cinematic meditation on space, reflection, and perception.

The studio designed a near-floating glass wall that functions as a holographic projection surface, blurring the line between public and private, viewer and image. This translucent plane both captures the reflection of passersby and reveals ethereal film projections, creating a layered, almost ghostly visual experience. A curtain at the back deepens the sense of interiority, evoking a lived-in domestic space that contrasts with the exterior street.

Strategic lighting and spatial composition guide the eye across the boutique, linking Lemaire’s garments to gesture and emotion, while the interplay of reflections and moving images reinforces a contemplative, introspective atmosphere. By combining technical precision, scenographic research, and poetic minimalism, Matiere Noire elevates the store into a quiet cinematic moment, where fashion and film intersect to create a nuanced, immersive experience.

Trauma x Art Basel 2025

Matiere Noire’s work for Trauma x Art Basel Paris 2025 transformed the subterranean U122AE club into an immersive nocturnal arena, where sound, movement, and visual art converged.

The studio designed a modular, multi-sensory environment that amplified the raw energy of the space while accommodating live performances, DJ sets, and site-specific installations. Lighting and projection were choreographed to interact with the architecture, emphasizing the club’s intimate, labyrinthine structure and casting ephemeral shadows that animated walls and ceilings.

By manipulating perception through layered surfaces and reflective planes, Matiere Noire created a dynamic dialogue between performers and audience, turning every corner into a moment of discovery. Materials were carefully selected to accentuate textures and movement, while technical coordination ensured seamless transitions between performances.

The result was an evocative nocturnal stage that honored Trauma’s ethos of experimental curatorial practice, heightening the interplay of art, music, and atmosphere for Art Basel week in Paris.

Courrèges Spring/Summer 2026

Matiere Noire’s scenography for Courrèges’s SS’26 show transformed the runway into a circular stage evoking the sun’s trajectory. Calibrated light shifts, from cool blues to warm, sunlit tones, accentuated the futuristic minimalism of the collection, highlighting hybrid silhouettes, UV‑blocking veils, and sculptural details. The immersive choreography of illumination framed the garments within a dynamic environment where light and design converge, reflecting Courrèges’s forward-looking modernism.

Y-3 Spring/Summer 2026

At Palais Brongniart, Y‑3’s SS26 presentation became a kinetic performance, with Matiere Noire’s scenography and lighting highlighting movement and form. Dancers and models navigated a minimalist stage where shadow and light sculpted the deconstructed silhouettes and technical fabrics, creating moments of both reveal and disappearance. Monochrome tones and sculptural volumes were amplified by shifting illumination, transforming the runway into a dynamic space where sport and avant‑garde design converged.

Mugler Spring/Summer 2024

For Mugler’s SS24 runway, Matiere Noire crafted a set and lighting scheme that amplifies the brand’s cinematic DNA under Casey Cadwallader. On a pristine, snow-white runway lined with mechanical fans, models glide in 7-meter chiffon trains that ripple like tentacles. A bespoke lighting rig sculpts each silhouette, synchronised with Total Freedom’s pulsing soundtrack, while the interplay of wind, fabric, and light provides a dynamic canvas for Torso’s live-action filming.

MM6 Spring/Summer 2026

Matiere Noire transformed a section of Via della Spiga in Milan into an urban runway, turning the street into a stage for MM6’s stripped-back silhouettes. Light and context guided perception as garments unfolded in real time, blending the everyday with the extraordinary. The spatial design highlighted fluidity and movement, emphasizing the interplay between minimalism, subtle experimentation, and the city as living scenography.

Tom Ford Spring/Summer 2024

Matiere Noire designed the lighting for Tom Ford’s SS24 runway, marking Peter Hawkings’ debut as creative director. The presentation evokes the house’s iconic shows through a contemporary lens, bathing the carpeted catwalk in warm, diffused light that accentuates the craftsmanship of each look. Secondary lighting along the runway adds delicate highlights on metallics and glitter, creating an editorial, cinematic atmosphere that balances subtlety with sultry sophistication.

Y-3 Fall/Winter 2025

Matiere Noire’s set and lighting design for Y-3 FW25 transformed Pavillon Cambon into a kinetic stage for Yohji Yamamoto and Adidas’s collaboration. A motorized, luminescent screen hovered above the runway, alternately revealing and concealing, guiding the audience through the choreography of deconstructed silhouettes and technical sportswear. Ambient lighting followed the screen’s movements, casting shifting shadows and sculpting the space, while film fragments – flashes of pattern-cutting and athletic gestures – interwove brand DNA with lived experience. Every gradient and directional beam directed attention, creating a dynamic, ever-evolving runway environment that balanced precision with poetic spectacle.

Courrèges Spring/Summer 2025

Matiere Noire’s contribution to Courrèges SS25 centered on a scenography of movement and rhythm, evoking the perpetual motion of waves. Within the house’s heritage white space, a monumental ‘Ocean Drum’ by Grönlund-Nisunen infused the runway with a layered soundscape of white noise, merging serenity and dissonance. Suspended LED panels sculpted the space, casting light across the square catwalk and emphasizing the contrast with the central black circle. Every element, from light to sound to spatial geometry, was orchestrated to transform the venue into a meditative, kinetic environment that mirrored the collection’s fluidity and structural precision.

Stone Island Fall/Winter 2024

Matiere Noire’s scenography for Stone Island AW24 positioned a central scaffolding structure as the backbone of the venue, framing the dialogue between human presence and technological precision. Archive pieces and new materials were reimagined through a dynamic interplay of light and sound, immersing the audience in the brand’s ethos of relentless innovation. The installation emphasized Stone Island’s material obsession, highlighting the textures, finishes, and transformative qualities of each garment while turning the runway into a living laboratory of experimentation and craft.

Jean Paul Gaultier

Matiere Noire transformed Jean-Paul Gaultier’s headquarters into a windswept portal between Parisian couture and maritime myth during Paris Couture Fashion Week. Motorized fabric modules animate the space, performing in theatrical breezes that shift from gentle billows to storm-like thrashes. A full-length screen layers digital imagery of azure horizons and shipwrecked fragments, evoking the tension between promise and chaos. The lighting design accentuates these shifts, with directional spots carving sculptural shadows and ambient washes providing a chromatic foundation for seamless transitions. The immersive installation positions the collection within a dynamic, cinematic environment where movement, light, and narrative converge.

Y-3 Fall/Winter 2024

Matiere Noire’s scenography and lighting design for Y-3 FW24 transformed Salle Pleyel into an orbital arena of intersecting planes and shadows. Three slender monoliths rise over a checkered runway, casting intertwining silhouettes across the matte flooring, while the brand’s expanded logo anchors the composition. Cloaked forms move through this high-contrast environment, tracing paths of light and dark that echo Y-3’s signature graphic palette. Subtle gradients and directional lighting accentuate the sharp, deconstructed lines of the collection, creating a theatrical stage where Yohji Yamamoto and Adidas’ collaboration performs as a kinetic interplay of geometry, shadow, and scale. The installation elevates the runway into a space of abstract narrative, balancing minimalist rigor with dynamic motion.

H&M&180, The London Issue

Matiere Noire’s scenography and lighting for H&M&180: The London Issue reframed 180 The Strand as a living runway‑concert hybrid. Monumental luminous screens and dynamic lighting choreographed the flow of 70 models, weaving fashion, performance, and sound into a single immersive experience. Light sculpted space and guided sightlines, amplifying the energy and fluidity of the presentation. By balancing architectural presence with kinetic movement, Matiere Noire’s design highlighted the multisensory spirit of H&M’s Autumn/Winter 2025 collection, turning the fashion moment into a cultural celebration of community and expression.

Miaou Spring/Summer 2024

For Miaou SS24 at Paris’ Intercontinental Hotel, Matiere Noire developed a scenography that contrasts the classical elegance of the venue with a hypercontemporary approach to light. Motorized fixtures trace circular paths around the runway, generating a sense of perpetual motion that echoes the rhythm of the collection. As the energy builds, the central crystal chandelier animates, dipping dramatically toward the audience, amplifying the theatricality of the presentation. The installation mirrors the Miaou girl’s rebellious, multifaceted spirit, transforming the space into a twisted fairytale where architecture, light, and motion converge to frame the collection’s distinctive silhouettes.

MM6 Pitti Uomo

For MM6 Men’s SS24 at Florence’s historic greenhouse, Matiere Noire transformed the windows into a layered interplay of light and shadow, blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior, past and present. Each chromatic overlay acts as a temporal editor, shifting the visual perception of garments as models move through zones of warm amber and cool LED light. The installation evokes the rhythm of a film reel, with figures materializing and dissolving within alternating fields of color. The scenography balances botanical heritage with Margiela’s signature muted futurism, creating simultaneous realities where architecture, light, and fashion intersect in a cinematic experience.

Marine Serre Fall/Winter 2023

For Marine Serre’s FW23 show at Paris’s Grande Halle de La Villette, Matiere Noire collaborated with set designer Rémy Brière to realize a monumental five-part installation. Three 8-meter towers, built from 1,300 kg of compressed vintage clothing, including denim, scarves, and t-shirts, stand as sculptural embodiments of circularity and upcycling. Light and haze transform the industrial space into an apocalyptic landscape, evoking climate urgency while framing the collection’s silhouettes. The scenography balances scale and texture, highlighting the interplay between fashion, sustainability, and architecture, creating an immersive narrative where design, materiality, and environmental consciousness converge.

Ann Demeulemeester Fall/Winter 2023

Matiere Noire’s lighting design for Ann Demeulemeester’s FW23 runway carves a dramatic pathway through the pitch-black hall of Lycée Carnot, evoking the clair-obscur intimacy of Flemish painting. The school’s neo-classical checkered flooring subtly emerges amid the darkness, framing a high-contrast dialogue between architecture and garment. A ritual of revelation and disappearance unfolds as beams of light guide models forward, their silhouettes materializing and dissolving in a delicate tension between presence and void. The scenography transforms the space into an immersive stage where light dictates the rhythm of perception, amplifying the collection’s haunting, poetic atmosphere.

ARCA

Under the vast centenary dome of the Bourse de Commerce, Matiere Noire was invited by Cyrus Goberville to design the closing performance of Arca’s 2024 world tour – a 72-hour, cathartic collision of sound, light, and architecture. Rather than competing with Tadao Ando’s monumental rotunda, the intervention activated its void: theremin vibrations testing the room’s acoustic curvature, piano lines carving moments of introspection, and a choreography of motorized lighting isolating key shifts in the performance’s dramaturgy.

At the center, a mechanical crane unfurled into a luminous, jellyfish-like apparition – a veiled zenithal ‘grape’ of light that tracked Arca’s movements with sculptural precision. Around the audience, skeletal light modules emerged like charred relics, enclosing the space in slow, tidal motion. Laser spectrograms rippled across the circular walls, pulsing in sync with Arca’s heartbeat, forming an ephemeral fresco that transformed the dome into a living instrument.

Courrèges Summer Club 2025

Set within Romainville’s metal sorting site, Courrèges’s Summer Club reimagines a post-industrial landscape as a luminous arena. Suspended above the main stage, a monolithic mirrored structure functions as both solar collector and light distributor, catching the day’s shifting sun and scattering reflections across the facility’s metallic surfaces. Matiere Noire’s light design builds on this natural choreography, allowing the rave’s atmosphere to evolve with the sky. As dusk settles, sunlight yields to a system of motorized spots and LED panels that extend the event’s kinetic charge into the night, transforming industrial rawness into a radiant, ever-changing environment.

Keinemusik Tempelhof

Set within the vast concrete plains of Berlin’s former Tempelhof Airport, Matiere Noire shapes Keinemusik’s open-air gathering into a monumental field of sound and light. The site’s expansive horizontality becomes the project’s central material: a runway-length axis of illumination cuts through the darkness, anchoring the crowd within a landscape normally defined by absence. Motorized beams sweep across the tarmac like scanning radars, echoing the location’s aviation history, while low-lying fog softens the brutalism of the surroundings into a cinematic haze.

The lighting design responds directly to the collective pulse – cool, architectural lines during meditative builds; eruptive strobe sequences that fracture the night during peak crescendos. Instead of transforming Tempelhof, the scenography amplifies its scale and strange beauty, turning the airfield into a sensorial commons where bodies, rhythm, and architecture align in a shared nocturnal choreography.

Dekmantel Festival 2025

For Dekmantel Festival 2025, Matiere Noire reimagines the relationship between stage, crowd, and landscape, crafting a scenographic and lighting environment that expands rather than overwhelms the festival’s iconic openness. Across forest clearings and industrial edges, custom-built lighting modules trace atmospheric contours instead of fixed stages – soft beams filtering through treetops at dusk, stark geometries slicing through late-night fog, and low-frequency strobes pulsing in sync with subterranean basslines.

Rather than imposing a singular visual identity, the design behaves like a living organism, shifting from meditative luminosity to high-intensity kinetics as artists modulate tempo and mood. These interventions create pockets of altered perception where nature, machinery, and music collapse into one sensorial plane. The result is a festival landscape that feels both wild and intentional, an evolving light architecture that deepens the collective trance Dekmantel is known for.

Courrèges Festival 2022

Conceived in a moment of post-pandemic release, the Courrèges Festival 2022 channels a shared longing for communion and shared abandon. Staged on the outskirts of Paris, the open-air rave unfolds within a sprawling landscape transformed into a labyrinth of smoke and mirrors. Oversized reflective panels catch and diffuse late-summer light, their surfaces alternately revealing and obscuring the dance floor as clouds of smoke drift through the site. Matiere Noire’s interplay of light, atmosphere, and spatial rhythm turns the grounds into a shifting, sensorial field – an environment where bodies move in and out of visibility, suspended in a collective, pulsating haze.

Carte Blanche to Arthur Jafa, Robert Hood + Crystallmess

For this carte blanche evening, the Bourse du Commerce’s neoclassical rotunda becomes a vessel for sonic and visual transcendence, where Arthur Jafa’s curatorial instinct converges with the propulsive energies of Robert Hood and Crystallmess.

Matiere Noire’s lighting design is embedded directly into the building’s architectural cavities, forming a chameleonic system that shifts in tandem with each musical movement. Chromatic manipulations guide the narrative – color variations distorting depth, stroboscopic bursts fracturing time, and slow, sinusoidal fades sending waves of illumination across the circular volume. The space splinters into simultaneous realities: pockets of intimate amber, explosive strobe-driven episodes, and soft gradient zones that offer brief visual reprieve. The result is a multisensory environment where sound, light, and architecture fold into one another, amplifying the emotional and physical charge of the performance.