Biography
Cecile Martin holds a Master in Architecture (MArch). She is a photographer, videographer, active in web and public art,
performer, stage designer, and curator of media arts and architecture in Montreal (Canada).
Since 2000, her practice has led her to work in Europe, Africa, Australasia, North and South America.
She exhibits her artwork, writes articles, and teaches at the School of Design of the Université du Québec
in Montreal (undergraduate & graduate). She also teaches at the Concordia University's Fine Arts Department,
in the Design and Computation Arts (DCART) Program. Martin has acted as member of dozens of juries, committees and as lecturer.
As general and artistic director of the organization Champ Libre, Cecile Martin realized 16
media arts site-specific events, in Montreal and worldwide, in public spaces or abandoned heritage buildings.
She then commissioned collaborative interventions between media artists and architects.
She is the 2009 recipient of the RAIC Foundation (Royal Architectural Institute of Canada) Scholarship.
In recent years, Cécile Martin presented the multi-screen video EXPOSE (MUTEK / Montreal
International Biennale of Digital Art, Festival du Nouveau Cinema / PHI Centre in Montreal). She created and performed
Royal Mustang with Li Alin (Théâtre La Chapelle scènes contemporaines, Montreal), participated in
several residencies including international cross-disciplinary TRYANGLE performing arts research laboratories
(Tanzhaus, Düsseldorf) and Sacatar Foundation (Bahia, Brazil). She designed the stage for Berlin choreographer
Georg Reischl’s Golden Trash, winner of Cologne’s 2013 Dance and Theatre Prize.
Cécile Martin is a PhD student in the Humanities at Concordia University's Centre for Interdisciplinary
Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC) in Montreal with advisors
Chris Salter, Orit Halpern and Alessandra Ponte.
She has been a Student Executive Member of the international network dedicated to research-creation
in the fields of media arts, design, technology and digital culture
Hexagram
and has coordinated the
Media Art Histories
Re-Create 2015, Emerging Researchers' Symposium.
Statement As architect of the invisible, Cecile Martin tirelessly explores and amplifies the unconscious, instinctive,
reflex perception of reality, in order both to disrupt and to balance the cohabitation between spaces, bodies and objects.
The cross contamination between my practices in art and architecture naturally leads me to question
the reciprocity between these disciplines. My interest lies in the linking of views, tools and knowledge
of both art and architecture through the creative practices and expertise of each of these disciplines.
Phenomenological research on the perception that the human body has of its environment is the foundation
of my practice. I bear a special interest in the proportion, scale and contrast of depth specific to a given space.
I integrate and transform through my creative process different aspects of any environment, always manipulating
these as totalizing qualities.
Captivated by the invisible characteristics of space, I tend to create an experiment in which the eye
and body wander. Each of my works is a construction of new spaces of perception, which take into account
at any given time the reciprocity between environments, bodies and objects therein. Through the use of glass,
mirrors and their effects in my pieces, the viewer is trapped between the work and reflections that occur within.