Chanel Haute Horlogerie 2026

Poised between blur and focus, the installation explores the thresholds of diffusion between two forms, sound and light. A constellation of monoliths conceals active systems, shaping acoustic and luminous elements into a unified composition. Within this shifting environment, the new 2026 Haute Horlogerie collection gradually comes into view.

Matières Fécales, The One Percent

For Matières Fécales’ ‘The One Percent,’ Matiere Noire shaped a scenographic environment that mirrors the collection’s dark satire of wealth and power. Presented during Paris Fashion Week, the show unfolds within a tense, theatrical atmosphere where excess and discomfort coexist – echoing the designers’ critique of the social elite and the distorted spectacle of luxury.

Matiere Noire’s lighting and spatial design amplify this unsettling narrative. The space is held in a state of suspended anticipation: darkness, low-frequency sound, and concentrated beams of light isolate figures as they emerge from the shadows. Harsh contrasts and sculptural silhouettes heighten the grotesque glamour of the collection, transforming the runway into a stage where power appears both seductive and monstrous. Through precise control of light and atmosphere, the scenography frames each passage like a fleeting apparition – an unsettling portrait of opulence pushed to its most theatrical extreme.

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.

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.

H&M + 180 The Strand

Matiere Noire’s scenography and lighting for H&M&180 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.

40 Years of Fondation Cartier, Pre-Opening

Marking forty years of creation and collaboration, the Fondation Cartier reveals its new Palais-Royal address through a museum in progress. Within Jean Nouvel’s unfinished building, Matiere Noire develops the scenography and lighting as a fluid framework that embraces the site’s incompleteness. Transparency, scale, and movement become active materials, shaping an evolving landscape of installations that unfold as a layered, cross-cultural narrative.

In collaboration with Atelier LUM, stripped-back IPN structures anchor the space, framing video works through a raw geometry that responds directly to the architecture’s foundations. Matiere Noire’s lighting design activates these forms, revealing subtle shifts in depth and perspective while maintaining a sense of openness and transition. A roaming soundscape threads through the environment, unifying the installations into a continuous sensory field – an immersive, evolving scenography that reflects the Fondation’s ethos of dialogue and reinvention.

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.

James Turrell ‘At One,’ 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.

Dekmantel Festival 2024

For the 10th edition of Amsterdam-based Dekmantel Festival, Matiere Noire conceives a scenography and lighting design inspired by the intensity of the summer solstice. The main stage is framed by a wall of cubic glass containers, each housing analog light effects and controlled pyrotechnics – fireworks, flamethrowers, sparklers, and smoke –forming a condensed constellation of luminous vitrines.

This evolving system translates the vibrancy of sunlight into a layered visual score, where illumination behaves like a living material. Above the crowd, a grid of rails carries a motorized cluster of lighting and atmospheric devices, gliding in slow zenithal motion across the dance floor. These shifting elements reveal and conceal fragments of bodies, stage, and structure, generating a continuous interplay of shadow and color.

Matiere Noire transforms the festival into a solar-driven architecture of light – an environment where energy, heat, and movement are rendered visible through a constantly mutating scenographic field.

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.

ROOM Y, Drumsheds

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.

ARCA 2024 World Tour, Paris

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 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.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

MM6, Fall/Winter 2025

For MM6’s Fall/Winter 2025 show, Matiere Noire transformed La Pelota’s industrial shell into a spatial echo of Maison Margiela’s historic Rue Saint-Maur headquarters. Through a precise choreography of furniture and light, the scenography reconstructs the architecture of the atelier in fragments: sofas stand in for rooms, their careful arrangement tracing invisible corridors across the floor. Draped entirely in white toile, the environment becomes both homage and abstraction, a neutral skin that recalls Margiela’s language of concealment and reinvention.

Matiere Noire’s lighting design treats this cloaked landscape as a surface for architectural memory. Soft overhead glows suggest hidden volumes, while directional beams carve shadows that evoke the geometry of the original building’s windows. As models move through the space, the installation shifts from domestic still life to living diagram, activating a subtle dialogue between past and present – an interior world reconstructed through atmosphere, gesture, and light.

Rains Pop-Up, Galeries Lafayette

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fondation 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.

Michelangelo Pistoletto – Metrocubo D’Infinito

For Michelangelo Pistoletto’s performance at the Bourse de Commerce, Matiere Noire extends the artist’s exploration of reflection into a precise scenographic and lighting composition. Centered around Metrocubo d’Infinito, six mirrored planes fold inward to form a cube, establishing a spatial device that multiplies perception and destabilizes orientation.

Matiere Noire’s intervention sharpens this optical tension. A stark white spotlight isolates the cube, casting geometric shadows across the concrete platform and heightening the sense of suspended activation. The stage’s usual openness is replaced by a reflective wall, dissolving boundaries between performer, object, and audience. Through this controlled environment, reflection becomes both material and mechanism – drawing viewers into a shifting field of refractions where space expands inward, endlessly.

MAGMA No. 3: Archive of the Future

For MAGMA No. 3: Archive of the Future, Matiere Noire constructs a scenographic environment that translates the publication into space, with the support of Bottega Veneta. Set within FORMA on rue de Turenne in Paris, the exhibition unfolds as a living archive where reading becomes movement and display becomes duration.

The scenography organizes the space as a field of slowed perception, where artworks, texts, and film fragments coexist within a continuous temporal rhythm. Rather than separating mediums, it aligns them into a shared spatial logic, inviting visitors to experience the exhibition as one would move through a book.

Works by Michel Journiac, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jonas Mekas, Jean-Luc Godard, and others are placed in shifting dialogue, forming constellations of image, memory, and sound. Matiere Noire shapes an atmosphere of pause and attention, where each element appears suspended within a broader narrative field. The exhibition becomes an ‘archive of the future’ in spatial form – open, layered, and evolving.

Kaleidoscope Manifesto 2024

For Kaleidoscope Manifesto 2024, Matiere Noire inhabits the modernist décor of Oscar Niemeyer’s architecture, transforming the Parisian Communist headquarters into a layered scenographic field for the annual arts and culture festival. Sandblasted car hoods are reworked as sculptural présentoirs, arranged across a modular stage system that reads as both altar and archive for fashion memorabilia.

High-tech LED screens are interwoven with these industrial fragments, blurring temporal and material references in a continuous play of texture, reflection, and diversion. Matiere Noire’s lighting design extends this dialogue into the live performances, enveloping the space in monochromatic haze and soft gradients that wash across the faceted dome. The result is an immersive environment where architecture, object, and image converge, expanding Niemeyer’s minimalist language into a shifting atmospheric composition that underscores the festival’s cross-disciplinary ethos.

Kaleidoscope Manifesto 2023

For Kaleidoscope Manifesto 2023, Matiere Noire responds to the futuristic language of Oscar Niemeyer’s architecture with a scenographic system built on fluidity and adaptation. Within a space where fine art, print, fashion, and live performance coexist, the design proposes modular structures that can be continuously reinterpreted by each participant.

These scenographic elements take the form of lightweight exoskeletons, their aluminum frames stretched with translucent lycra skins that shift between surface and volume. Acting simultaneously as projection planes, printed canvases, and three-dimensional display systems, they accommodate an ever-changing constellation of objects and uses. Matiere Noire’s approach transforms the exhibition into a living infrastructure – an adaptable framework where disciplines overlap, and where form is constantly rewritten by context, gesture, and use.

Solstice Festival 2022

Set deep within the pines of the Ruka forest, Matiere Noire designs a secluded pavilion for Solstice 2022, positioned just beyond the pulse of the festival. Conceived as a study in perception, the structure becomes an isolated chamber dedicated to the experience of darkness and its return to light.

Inside this enclosed space, visitors are immersed in a controlled void where visibility is gradually suspended, allowing perception to recalibrate. Matiere Noire’s scenography treats darkness not as absence, but as material – an active condition that heightens sensitivity to the surrounding environment. After prolonged immersion, the exterior landscape slowly re-emerges, its subtle solar variations amplified by contrast.

Accompanied by a meditative bass composition by conceptual musician Puce Mary, the installation unfolds as a gradual sensory descent and return, where light and shadow are experienced as shifting states of awareness rather than opposites.

Bad Gyal World Tour

For Bad Gyal’s world tour, Matiere Noire develops a scenographic and lighting system that amplifies the artist’s fluid, genre-crossing universe. The stage is conceived as a flexible environment, shifting between moments of intimacy and high-intensity performance.

Lighting structures divide the space into clear zones, isolating the performer before expanding into the crowd. Pulsing beams, saturated washes, and sharp contrasts follow the rhythms of the music, while visual elements are revealed and obscured in sequence.

Matiere Noire approaches the concert as a continuous flow, where scenography and performance merge into a single evolving atmosphere shaped by movement, energy, and presence.

To Be Sung, Pharrell Williams x Pascal Dusapin

For ‘To Be Sung,’ a collaboration between Pharrell Williams and composer Pascal Dusapin, Matiere Noire developed a scenographic and lighting environment that bridges contemporary music, opera, and visual installation. Conceived as a spatial counterpart to the work’s experimental score, the design frames the performance as a shifting landscape of sound, voice, and movement.

Matiere Noire’s lighting acts as a dramaturgical tool, sculpting the stage through restrained beams, gradual fades, and zones of luminous intensity. Rather than illustrating the music, the scenography creates an atmosphere in which performers appear and dissolve within fields of light, amplifying the emotional resonance of Dusapin’s composition and Pharrell’s creative vision. The result is a minimal yet immersive stage language – one where architecture, voice, and light converge to shape a quietly powerful performance space.

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.

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.

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.

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.

MIASMA x Blackhaine & Hannah Rose Stewart

For MIASMA, a live AV installation by Blackhaine and Hannah Rose Stewart, Matiere Noire constructs a lighting and spatial environment that amplifies the work’s descent into dread, mourning, and alienation. Combining dance, video, sound, and Butoh-inflected movement, the piece unfolds as a fragmented narrative in which a blackened void opens within an urban car park, seeping into a nearby town like an atmospheric rupture.

Matiere Noire’s lighting design isolates performers within stark, theatrical beams, suspending bodies between presence and projection. These shifting cones of light act as both stage and threshold, collapsing the distance between filmed image, live choreography, and audience perception. Neo-noir textures and low-lying darkness expand the sense of disorientation, while intermittent flashes reveal and erase figures in equal measure.

The result is a spatial and emotional field where performance and environment continuously contaminate one another, drawing the audience into a shared condition of unease and absorption.

Tancade, Gaspar Claus

For Tancade, Matiere Noire develops a scenographic system of three autonomous light sculptures accompanying Gaspar Claus and Basile 3 on stage. Conceived as active presences rather than fixed fixtures, the sculptures respond in real time to the musical progression, shaping a shifting dialogue between sound, body, and light.

Each structure contains three distinct lighting systems: an indirect incandescent glow, a wide flood that washes across the stage, and a focused beam that cuts sharply through space. Modulated in intensity and direction, these sources continuously reconfigure the volumetric perception of the performance environment, expanding and compressing space in rhythm with the music.

Matiere Noire’s approach treats light as a compositional instrument, capable of articulating tension, intimacy, and fragmentation. Across the live performance, the interplay between the three sculptures constructs an evolving scenographic score – one that is both precise in its control and open to improvisation.