CLARISSE DEGENEFFE (Belgium)

Embodied Philosophy · Mythopoetic Visual Arts · Parrhēsiastic Performance

A Belgian native, Clarisse began her artistic journey at the Kleine Academie (Jacques Lecoq) before training as an actress at the National Institute of Audiovisual & Performing Arts (INSAS) in Brussels. She then pursued studies in Philosophy and Art History at the Catholic University of Leuven, before completing a Master’s degree at Panthéon-Sorbonne, specializing in Cinema History. Alongside, she holds two certificates: the Shakespeare Intensive from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and the Filmmaking Certificate from the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield.

Her academic research delved into themes such as the 1970s performance tradition, the marketing of femininity during the Riot Grrrl punk era, the demonic figure of female rage in the works of Dostoevsky and Freud, the technologies of violence in art and cultural systems through the lens of Antonin Artaud. Specializing in Cinema History, she wrote her thesis on feminine archetypes in the philosophical and cinematographic work of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Alongside her research runs a practice of mythopoetic visual arts: drawing as dream-work, translating what surfaces in sleep and in liminal states into a visual vocabulary that can serve as gates for body states, whether it’s on paper, on screen or on stage.

This is the ground her current Final Project, Phantasmata (a natural continuation of her earlier solo Voodoo Child, which drew on Agamben’s House on Fire, and turns this time to his writing Nymph) now works from: a musical performance following elemental creatures excluded from every economy of redemption.