About Matthew C. Wilson

Matthew C. Wilson is an American filmmaker, artist, and researcher based in the Netherlands. Wilson holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. He has participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program, Skowhegan, and the Jan van Eyck Academie. Wilson has been an artist in residence at Aalto University, Helsinki, FI, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Porto, PT, Tabakalera, Donostia/San Sebastián, ES, among others.

Wilson’s exhibitions have included Galeria Skala, Poznań, Poland, Walk&Talk Festival of Art, São Miguel, Azores, PT, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, NL, Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool, UK, among others. His films have screened on Vdrome.org, at IFFR - International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, and HKW - Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Wilson also teaches at the Sandberg Institute, the graduate school of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.

In his films, sculptures, and installations, viewers meet a range of agents—human, non-human, and inter-subjective—entangled with natural processes and shape-shifting historical forces. His research and projects utilize context-specific and methodologically eclectic approaches to track the inertia of modernity (as an interconnected process of capitalism, coloniality, industrialism, liberalism, and the Enlightenment) through contemporary ecological crises and into speculative futures.

His primary focus at present is film and its relation to social imaginaries. He develops a sensorial approach to filmmaking through blending experimental film and artist’s moving image with narrative cinema.

IAS Future Heritage Residency

IAS and Allard Pierson have created the Future Heritage Residency as a space where research and science meet art, where heritage helps us imagine the future, and where UvA’s research community and collections meet the public.

The Future Heritage artist residency project ‘As Messengers’, conducted together with Emilia Tapprest, explores the intricate relationship between social imaginaries and biodiversity loss, using the concept of 'historical forks' as critical junctures where alternative trajectories could have been pursued.

By examining pivotal moments in scientific inquiry into biology and ecology, materialized in texts and artifacts archived in the Allard Pierson collection and Artis Library in Amsterdam, we will seek not only to explore alternative ways of being and perceiving (‘umwelts’) that could have developed from the historical past, but also propose the present as yet another fork which implies agency in the making of possible futures. Through an iterative and collaborative process, we are drawn to the question of how alternative worlds evoke new subjectivities and ‘sensorial paradigms’.