Cultural Programming and Ordinaire Extra !
Cultural Programming
Meeting and Conferences
Throughout the year, the Foundation offers meetings echoing the exhibitions.
ORDINAIRE EXTRA!
The Foundation offers a playful and creative program to extend the visit of the two exhibitions with family during each school vacation as well as initiation workshops throughout the year.
Robin Bourgeois – Wood, Paper, scissors
For ages 10 and up.
Wednesday, March 5, 2:00 PM – 4:30 PM
Designer Robin Bourgeois invites you to explore chestnut wood weaving through cutting, weaving, and bending both wood and paper. This workshop aims to reintroduce this traditional craft from the Limousin region by creating an everyday object during the session.
Alice Roux – From the forest to the object
For ages 10 and up.
Wednesday, April 23, 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM
In this workshop, designer Alice Roux invites you to explore an amazing material: pine resin. Through various artisanal techniques, learn how to use resin as a raw material to design small objects.
Wood Workshop – Young Audience
Family workshop, for ages 8 and up
One Saturday per month from 10:00 AM to 12:30 PM
Children must be accompanied by an adult.
Starting again in June 2025
Each child, accompanied by cabinetmaker Mathias Heinisch, will create objects while discovering the use of traditional tools.
Registration: ateliers_bois@orange.fr
€45 per child
Youth Woodworking Workshops

Woodwork workshop – Copyright: Laetitia Lavalette
YOUTH WOODWORKING WORKSHOP
The Martell Foundation will reopen the doors of its Woodworking Workshop and offer an immersive experience in the world of cabinetmaking, specially designed for young audiences. Each child, accompanied by cabinetmaker Mathias Heinisch, will create wooden objects.
Workshop Objectives:
– Discover the workshop and become familiar with the tools and how they work: planes, coping saws, etc.
– Get introduced to the material and textures of wood
– Learn manual techniques
Safety Guidelines:
– Wear flat, closed-toe shoes (safety overshoes will be provided)
– Wear comfortable clothing
– Tie back hair
An apron, cut-resistant gloves, and ear protection will be provided before the workshop.
Participants will not use power tools or machines.
Registration (for children only): From 8 years old. Children must be accompanied by an adult.
To register, contact Mathias Heinisch by email: ateliers_bois@orange.fr
Cost per session: €45 (2.5 hours); to be paid on-site by check or cash.
Maximum of 7 children per session.
The sessions will resume in June 2025
Mathias Heinisch has a cabinetmaking background. He designs and creates custom furniture and fittings for private individuals, businesses, or artists. He primarily works with local woods and, whenever possible, reclaimed wood (oak, walnut, cedar, boxwood, maple, ash). He has also worked in a luthier workshop where he built and restored guitars.
Workshops in partnership with Essarbois.
Mathilde Pellé - Hollow Path
MATHILDE PELLÉ
CHEMIN CREUX - HOLLOW PATH
June 8 - December 29, 2024
The Fondation d’Entreprise Martell launches its new exhibition-residency format and invites the designer Mathilde Pellé to share and develop her research approach called «Subtraction». By unfolding various aspects of the work carried out since 2016 – both experimental, critical, formal, and theoretical – the exhibition encourages a careful examination of objects proposed by our societies and the forms that can emerge through subtraction. Pellé continues the inexhaustible question that guides her creations, her thinking, and her relationship to design: «Why is there something rather than less?»
For the exhibition «Hollow Path», she experiments with the ruin of domestic environments by subtraction and imposes a protocol by which she removes material from everyday objects by scraping and stripping them, thus creating new objects from the void.
Drawing on aspects of her work, she shares her insights into a direction that is completely disregarded in favour of more, addition, and growth: that of less. Her approach leads her to study the barriers (political, social, psychological, etc.) that limit our ability to choose less and/or accept it. Why is adding more, in most cases, the predominant choice? What are the logics at work that lead us globally to choose more, how did they emerge, and why?
Since the limits linked to material production must be recognised and accepted globally in these times marked by ecological urgency, should we not at the same time open up a non-limiting exploration of less, of the little, of the smallest?
If it is approached as a direction to be probed, the less allows us to reconsider our material environments and authorises a critique of the dominant models that are curiously both producers of exhaustion and saturation.
Why are the abilities of artists and designers to read and analyse the world of forms (surrounding and/or produced) essential to the reformulation of a common equilibrium? In what ways can these non-academic approaches be the vectors or supports of profound transformations? It is these «hollow paths», without certain answers, that Mathilde Pellé explores.