Clément Cogitore Director

Clément Cogitore studied at the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg and Le Fresnoy-National Studio of Contemporary Arts in Tourcoing and has developed a style that lies at the mid-point between cinema and contemporary art. By mixing films, videos, installations and photographs his work questions the way men coexist with their images. More often than not, it is a question of rituals, collective memory, representations of the sacred, as well as a certain notion of the permeability of worlds. His work has been exhibited and projected in numerous museums and centres of art including the Palais de Tokyo and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London, the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, the Kunsthaus in Basle, and New York’s MoMA. In 2015, his first full-length feature Neither Heaven nor Earth was screened in the International Critics’ Week section of the Cannes Film Festival and received the Gan Foundation Award and the Prize for Best First Film from the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics. It was also nominated for a César in the Best First Film category. His documentary Braguino was released in theatres in 2017 and won awards at numerous festivals (including the Zabaltegi-Tabalakera Award at the San Sebastian Festival). That same year, he adapted an extract from JeanPhilippe Rameau’s operaballet Les Indes galantes with the aid of a group of Krump dancers for the Paris Opera’s digital platform the 3e Scène. In 2012 / 2013, he was a resident artist at the Académie de France in Rome (Villa Medicis). He also received the Grand Prize at the Salon de Montrouge (2011) for his work as a video director, the BAL Award for Young Creation (2015), the Prix Science Po for Contemporary Art and the Ricard Foundation Prize for contemporary art (2016). In 2018, he won the prestigious Marcel-Duchamp Prize for his video installation The Evil Eye. Les Indes galantes is his first opera production. 

Clément Cogitore is making his Paris Opera debut.