Clément Cogitore works at the intersection of cinema and contemporary art. Yet for the French artist, these two fields are not contradictory territories. Film, video, installation, archives and found images belong to a shared investigation into narrative and the ways images produce meaning.
Throughout this conversation, one question gradually emerges: how do we distinguish reality from memory, belief or fiction? In Ferdinandea, a project centred on a volcanic island that emerged in the Mediterranean in 1831 before disappearing only months later, this question becomes at once historical, geopolitical and poetic.
From Christian Boltanski to the construction of a visual language
Cogitore recalls encountering a work by Christian Boltanski as a teenager: black-and-white photographs, small lights and an almost rudimentary arrangement. What struck him was not monumentality, but the contrast between the simplicity of the means and the complexity of the experience.
“The work evoked something very complex for me, with extremely simple means.”
This encounter already contains an essential aspect of Cogitore’s understanding of art. Complexity does not necessarily require an accumulation of signs. It can emerge through their combination, their silences and the relationships between them.
The same principle informs his movement between cinema and exhibitions. He compares the two to different literary forms: “It is a little like a writer moving from the novel to poetry without, for all that, leaving the field of literature.”
Clément Cogitore and editing as a producer of meaning
Editing is central to Cogitore’s practice, not simply as a cinematic technique but as a way of thinking.
“It is often not the image itself that interests me, but the relationship that images construct between themselves.”
An image can therefore change meaning according to the image, sound or text placed beside it. This helps explain Cogitore’s attraction to archives and pre-existing images. The challenge is not necessarily to manufacture a new visual object, but to establish a relationship between existing elements that did not previously exist.
His work consequently gives particular importance to friction, gaps and uncertainty. An artwork does not simply show something; it constructs a relationship that the viewer must negotiate.
Memory, documentary and fiction
For Cogitore, the logic of editing extends far beyond cinema. It describes something fundamental about memory itself.
“Our memory is a machine for fictionalising.”
We cannot retain everything. Certain events are selected, others disappear, and connections are reconstructed between fragments. History attempts to contain this instability through documents and verification, yet it too remains dependent on selection.
Cogitore compares this process to cinematic framing: showing one thing necessarily means excluding another.
“Even framing a situation means deciding what will be inside the frame and deciding what will not.”
The permeable boundary between documentary and fiction therefore becomes one of the key territories of his work.
Ferdinandea: an island between Sicily and Tunisia
The Ferdinandea project began with a few lines Cogitore discovered in a book in a second-hand bookshop in Palermo. They described the emergence in 1831 of the summit of the underwater volcano Empedocles in the Strait of Sicily.
For several months, an island existed between Sicily and Tunisia. Nearby populations sometimes interpreted the phenomenon as divine punishment or the appearance of a monster. Scientists, sailors and artists travelled to observe it. European powers soon followed.
Britain, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and France rapidly understood the strategic significance of a new territory in the Mediterranean and attempted to claim it.
For Cogitore, the apparent absurdity of these competing gestures conceals something much more serious:
“Behind this slightly absurd game, there are real geopolitical stakes.”
A vanished territory that remains politically active
Ferdinandea eventually disappeared beneath the waves, but its location retained its strategic importance. Cogitore points to the multiple flows that still intersect in this part of the Mediterranean between east and west, north and south.
The project therefore reaches beyond a nineteenth-century episode. It connects colonial history to a present shaped by borders, circulation, resources and migration.
The question becomes more fundamental:
“What is a landscape that appears and disappears?”
Even submerged, the island continues to exist through maps, archives, memories and the competing claims once made upon it. The physical landscape disappears; the political and imaginary landscape remains.
Incertitude: when contradictory narratives coexist
The central film in the project, Incertitude, initially resembles a historical documentary before gradually moving towards speculative fiction and imagining the island’s possible re-emergence.
Yet this distinction is deliberately unstable. Historical documents already contain superstition, error, propaganda and deliberate falsehood.
Cogitore therefore refuses to systematically rank the different voices. Verified events coexist with mistaken perceptions and collective beliefs. All nonetheless respond to the same phenomenon.
This approach is encapsulated in his definition of belief:
“Belief itself is a very, very broad spectrum that goes from lies all the way to poetry.”
From conflict to narrative
Ferdinandea is also a history of rivalry: competing powers, competing names and competing versions of the same territory.
For Cogitore, this structure extends far beyond the island itself. Conflict is one of the fundamental mechanisms of narrative. As soon as individuals or worldviews come into opposition, a story emerges through confrontation, negotiation or attempted resolution.
“That is what makes the DNA of a narrative profoundly political.”
Through Ferdinandea, Clément Cogitore is therefore not simply recounting the history of a vanished island. He examines the moment when reality becomes a narrative — then several competing narratives — and how those narratives, in turn, transform our perception of reality.
FAQ — Clément Cogitore
Who is Clément Cogitore?
Clément Cogitore is a French artist and filmmaker whose practice moves between cinema, video and contemporary art.
What themes does Clément Cogitore explore?
Clément Cogitore examines memory, images, narrative, belief, conflict and the shifting boundary between documentary and fiction.
What is Ferdinandea in Clément Cogitore’s work?
For Clément Cogitore, Ferdinandea is simultaneously a historical event, a geopolitical territory and a framework through which narratives can be examined.
Why is editing important to Clément Cogitore?
Clément Cogitore argues that meaning often emerges from relationships between images rather than from isolated images.
How does Clément Cogitore relate cinema to contemporary art?
Clément Cogitore treats them as distinct narrative forms that nevertheless belong to the same broader language of moving images.
What role does memory play in Clément Cogitore’s work?
For Clément Cogitore, memory necessarily selects and reorganises experience, introducing an element of reconstruction.
Why does Clément Cogitore connect documentary and fiction?
Clément Cogitore sees the boundary between them as permeable because framing and selection always involve construction.
What does belief mean for Clément Cogitore?
Clément Cogitore describes belief as a broad spectrum extending from deliberate falsehood to poetic imagination.
Why is the Mediterranean important to Clément Cogitore’s Ferdinandea?
The Mediterranean becomes a space where history, territory, circulation, political rivalry and collective imagination intersect.
What role does conflict play for Clément Cogitore?
Clément Cogitore understands antagonism as one of the fundamental engines of narrative and therefore as inherently political.
