FINAL PROJECT : NYMPH / PHANTASMATA

Phantasmata begins from the contradiction that the performing body tends toward image, archetype or symbol while resisting fixation. The project does not seek imageless performance; it asks how the body becomes image without becoming petrified by that image.

Current constellation: Domenico da Piacenza, Aby Warburg, Giorgio Agamben, Georges Didi-Huberman, Marion Milner, Anton Ehrenzweig, Despina Zacharopoulou, Hilma af Klint, MAI and Damien Jalet.

It continues the solo associated with Agamben’s “Nothing I Do Makes Sense If the House Is on Fire,” shifting toward Nymph, phantasm, image survival, iconoclasm and limit-states.

PHANTASMA — DOMENICO DA PIACENZA

Phantasma is the sudden arrest between movements: a body petrified as if encountering Medusa. Yet the arrest contains memory and the measure of the whole choreographic series; immediately afterward the body launches again like a falcon driven by hunger.

It is not static image but potential energy contained inside an arrested image. Image/body, form/matter, past/present and stillness/movement collapse momentarily.

NYMPH — WARBURG / AGAMBEN

Warburg’s Nymph is elemental spirit and pagan goddess in exile. For Clarisse she becomes persona and epistemological posture between body/spirit, form/becoming, history/afterlife and image/movement. She is excluded from an economy of salvation; the project is not organised around healing, redemption or resolution.

Agamben extends Nymph into time: form coincides momentarily with matter while origin cannot be separated from becoming. Nymph offers identity without fixing identity.

ICONOCLASTIC DESIRE

Iconoclasm means breaking idols and petrified concepts to which one remains attached, with a hidden desire to replace the broken idol with something living. The project asks which images this historical moment can bear and what happens when a performer refuses available images.

Context includes post-industrial Europe, mass image production, productivity, identity economies, political power, fragile peace, war, colonial and Catholic heritage. Iconoclasm becomes tied to identity survival.

LIMIT-STATES

Fasting, exhaustion, sensory isolation, long duration, cold, repetition and altered temporal perception are research sites where ordinary organisation weakens and bodily memory, images, impulses and projections become perceptible before conscious mediation. They are not valuable merely for extremity and must not become proof of authenticity.

PERFORMANCE-AS-SURVIVANCE

Despina Zacharopoulou’s performance-as-surface treats the body as a field occupied by intensities and violence as transmutation. Clarisse recognises the force, including MAI moments when unified self dissolved and water/light organised action, but diverges at a decisive point: something returns.

The image is not fully evacuated. Phantasma and Pathosformel survive as traces capable of reappearing after transformation. Performance-as-survivance is not return to a fixed original image; it is image surviving through change.

INNER LIBRARY / MYTHOPOETIC VISUAL ARTS

Following Marion Milner, the artist constructs an inner library against mass-produced images: drawings, paintings, music, fragmented writing, dreams, body images and performance residues. The journal asks which images appear, persist, are unconsciously reproduced or need breaking.

Drawing functions as dream-work and visual material becomes a gate toward body states on paper, screen and stage.

ARCHAEOLOGICAL PREDECESSOR

This project is a displacement of the earlier solo Nothing I Do Makes Sense If the House Is on Fire, associated with Agamben’s formulation. The earlier work asks from inside fire—crisis, destruction and urgency. Phantasmata asks what image survives the fire: image survival, becoming and what returns.