Mathild Clerc-Verhoeven

In September 2024 Artists Cecile Hübner and Mathild Clerc-Verhoeven invited weaver Severine Amsing and electrical engineer Marcel van der Horst to weave pockets in three dimensions with copper yarn. Pockets that could conceal things. After a series of pockets, Mathild and Cecile kept weaving, and a whole room came out of the loom.

Pocket Veto explores the pocket’s evolving role as a carrier of contemporary objects such as smartphones and bank cards. While the connection between these objects and the issue of unprotected data is widely acknowledged, it remains difficult to grasp in tangible terms.

Within this collaborative context, copper became a tool to document experimentation, discoveries and misunderstandings. Pocket Veto forms a creative space, within which Cecile, Mathild, Severine and Marcel engaged with various invisible phenomenon—whether because they cannot be seen (wireless communication), because we pay them no attention (pockets), or because they are hidden (inside pockets).

This installation features a rotating platform with a half-scale bus stop. The rotating platform serves as a symbolic reference to commercial display mechanisms, emphasizing the continuous circulation of objects and images in consumer culture. The bus stop, constructed at a 1:2 scale, is modeled after the standardized design by JC Decaux, a company responsible for installing these structures in over 200 countries worldwide. By incorporating this recognizable urban element, the installation highlights the global reach of corporate influence on public space and everyday infrastructure.

Clerc-Verhoeven built the bus stop with a smooth finish and the platform with a rough texture to create a décalage, a deliberate contrast that disrupts expectations. This juxtaposition questions the polished illusion of commercial spaces and the hidden labor, wear, and imperfections that exist beneath their surface.

“Enumeration and forecast of something that may happen in the future. The list includes the following examples of solidified pastes used commercially: PVC Polypropylene Urea formaldehyde resin Duflex Transpex Melinex Polyurethane foam Perspex Celluloid Acrylic Polymermodified concrete Duraseal Duraform Transparent film high-gloss laminated book jackets. The forecast concerns a point in time when these pastes begin to grow soft and then liquefy. At first, the melting mass moves slowly, still lumpy, and viscous, then it begins to flow downhill in sluggish streams. At the bottom it collects, forming a lake that rises more and more rapidly, spreading and joining up with a nearby lake from a neighbouring town. It has a streaky pattern, like a certain kind of India-rubber that is not so produced anymore nowadays. Unlike the skyscrapers which have already become liquid, trees are still sticking out; the mass climbs slowly up until eventually after some hesitation it silently closes over them. Anything that has not yet fled in aeroplanes or ship is carefully encased and kept forever; every cry, every sigh is faithfully preserved in a bubble in front of and over the mouth. Then the surface crinkles, and the liquid is beginning to solidify again into an even resilient plain. The ships move more slowly and finally stands still, the aeroplanes and birds remain lying there, only slightly damaged by the impact of their fall.”

Christian Enzensberger, Smut: An Anatomy of Dirt, 1972

Journeylass Crops is a timber-framed sculpture that refers to common barn constructions, and materialises from an experimental apprenticeship between Olga and her apprentice Mathild. It explores the subjects of cultivation and gathering leftover crops as metaphors for social and political engagement.

Its permanent relocation extends the legacy of the commissioned project, connecting the work to new audiences at Common Knowledge. The presentation forms part of EVA’s ongoing ‘Legacy Projects’ programme.

Olga Micińska (Poland, 1987) is an artist, woodworker and educator. Her work combines the practical aspects of craft with fantastical anecdotes, while projecting grounds for cooperation, knowledge-sharing, and handling of the material and non-material resources. As co-founder of an experimental platform The Building Institute, Micińska explores the educational potential of art by rethinking the traditional apprenticeship model and supporting emancipation of young women and non-binary folk in technical trades.

'Glass Is Silent Until It Breaks' is a real and fictive tool inspired by an XVIII-century machine that can unpolish glass. It was created through The Building Institute. TBI is an informal platform created by Olga Micińska to emancipate technical skills in art, combining feminism, craftsmanship, and radical artistic performance.

Reflection on the circulation of gaze between public and private space through a tool often see in Amsterdam, specifically in de Jordaan neighborhood, a spionnetje (spying mirrors).

French Shopping connects two overlooked objects through textile and video. Clerc-Verhoeven explored the history of pockets and transformed this historical research into a series of handmade garments that became tools for investigating contemporary shoplifting practices. She conducted interviews with ‘professional’ shoplifters, initially focusing on the practicality of her textile pieces for their practice. However, their conversations naturally expanded beyond technique to explore what shoplifting does to them—how a daily practice, repeated gestures shape their perspective on society. Beyond theft, they spoke about politics, family, playfulness, capitalism, and ecology.

To make these perspectives visible, she provokes an impossible encounter between different subjectivities. She invited people unfamiliar with the topic of shoplifting to read the transcripts aloud on camera. The resulting 50-minute video captures eight readings, each performed by one or two participants encountering the text for the first time.

French Shopping is a fictional essay that offers a perspective in which shoplifting becomes a tool for revealing the failures of our capitalist system. In this essay, the thief becomes an archetype who explores public space as a territory of consumption. Readers, you are complicit from the outset, drawn into the urgency of considering shoplifting not only as a theoretical subject, but also as a craft. From there, I will show you my deeply rooted interests in artistic concerns about textures, material qualities, and methods of practice. An ordinary moment of illness becomes a moment of reflection. The mercury in the thermometer, lively and quick (quicksilver in English), evokes Mercury, the god of transactions and movement in Roman mythology. Mercury turns out to be both the god of merchants and thieves. Like the mercury in the thermometer, shoplifters seem to take the temperature of our capitalist infrastructure, but also signal its illnesses.

During the Art & Research programme (Gerrit Rietveld Academie & University of Amsterdam), Joana, Pepijn, Rots and Mathild created Floating Platform, an on- and offline platform about the connection between water and social issues such as mobility, migration and climate. The aim to bridge the overlaps between the practices of science and art provoked a strong incentive to work collectively in order to create new modes of research.