What dissolves in the cocoon

Before becoming something else, the caterpillar must first let go. Renée Edmona Mathews is a Barbadian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist based in Montreal who works in soft sculpture, wearable art, and performance. She crochets and wraps secondhand textiles through repetitive, meditative gestures, in a practice that, in her own words, “tends toward the tedious.” Her recent work, COCOON, began as “a portable place to hide.” She set it aside, returned to it nearly a year later, and then inhabited it for several hours as part of a durational performance, conversing with the audience through its walls.

For the first live recording of *The Blue Hour*, Alex Coma and Renée Edmona Mathews use her practice as a gateway to artists’ “shadow work”: what we hide, what we repeat, and what we inherit. The conversation touches on the return of Saturn, alienation—both Marx’s concept and the kind that precedes a metamorphosis—mothering and the gifts passed down through the maternal lineage, the body as a vessel, as well as the contrast between the discipline of ballet and the freedom of hip swaying.

The event will be conducted in English. Questions from the audience in French are welcome. No reservation is required.