Clarinde Wesselink is a choreographer, filmmaker and dancer whose work transcends anthropocentric perspectives to forge new pathways of connection between human and non-human entities. Her practice invites audiences to rethink choreography as an interspecies dialogue, a collaborative exchange with animals, plants, objects, and even microorganisms. By approaching bodies, both human and non-human, as porous membranes, Wesselink explores how we might cultivate more attuned and interconnected relationships with the places we inhabit.
Wesselink’s artistic practice delves into how movement and corporeality can create a shared language that bridges species boundaries. Her work is driven by questions such as: How does our perception of time shift when the body responds to environmental sounds, following the rhythm of a neighbor making coffee for instance, or observes natural movements, tracing the trajectory of an ant that accidentally walks on our arm? These explorations shape her choreography, transforming it into a medium that deepens our awareness and reconfigures our attunement to time and place.
It is a practice that thrives on collaboration, merging insights from artists, scientists, writers, and non-human species alike to explore movement, time, and ecological connections. A pivotal influence has been her partnership with performance artist Jeremiah Day since 2015, drawing on Simone Forti's ‘moving-speech’ methodology. This shaped the textual and narrative foundation of her dream-like performances and films, including the internationally acclaimed performance Water Werkers (2016) and the award-winning film Horizon Tales (2018), which have been presented in galleries like AKINCI and at festivals across Europe and the U.S.
A residency at Knockvologan Studies on Scotland’s Isle of Mull marked a turning point, as Wesselink began exploring choreographies inspired by the rhythms of non-human life, such as frogs. Collaborations with scientists and lichenologists further deepened her engagement with micro-ecosystems, leading to choreographic approaches that reflect discontinuity and challenge linear narratives by embracing plural temporalities. Projects like The Brook (2020), where she embodied a stone in a stream to witness seasonal shifts, and Tuning (2024), which used environmental stimuli to generate new choreographic vocabularies, reimagine performance spaces as dynamic ecological fields. Wesselink’s recent works prioritize audience participation, as seen in The Reason I Move (2022), where workshops became an integral part of the exhibit, and The Garden (2022), a collaboration with amateur athletes to explore the interplay between bodies and nature.
In 2024, Wesselink partnered with architect Ania Moleda to explore sustainable relationships with the environment through workshops and physical explorations. Concurrently, her work with sound artist Rutger Muller on a self-generating ‘sound-entity’ examines how stress, often viewed as disruptive, might reveal new possibilities of being in the world.
Wesselink’s academic journey reflects her commitment to rigorous exploration and innovation. Currently, she is in the second year of her Master’s program at DAS Choreography in Amsterdam and pursuing a parallel program at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Guided by mentors such as Susan Leigh Foster, Dana Caspersen, Bojana Cvejić, and Deborah Hay, she has cultivated an ecological approach to choreography. In her work, language and movement intertwine, fostering spaces that enhance social connection and ecological awareness.
Clarinde Wesselink’s work stands as an invitation to reimagine the boundaries of what it means to be human and our permeable relationship with the environment. Through deeply immersive experiences, she challenges perceptions of time and inspires a renewed sense of care for the intricate web of life.
Press Release
They are not sculpture, but the films and drawings of Clarinde Wesselink inhabit space as a sculpture does. Moving through water, flying in the air, running on the ground—all these figures in motion leave an imprint, however fleeting, on the medium that surrounds or supports them, like an image that remains momentarily on the retina after the act of perception. Accustomed as we are to see imprints as solid bodies produced by coming into contact with some other solid body, from death masks to Duchamp’s Feuille de vigne femelle, these moving bodies leave an imprint that is invisible, but no less present for that. Clarinde catches and documents these intangible imprints, these traces. Vanished from sight, she brings them back, momentarily (in her time-based media) or frozen in time (in the drawings). The lava landscape, the garden, the brook: all are environments in which the body leaves a trace, or rather a multitude of traces, invisible but perceptible to and through the other senses. They may recall a passing form: a leaf, poised in a paused instant as it stands to attention. They may suggest a communication by signs with hands or other limbs as its hieroglyphs, an articular system that speaks through its own body language in an unwritten choreography. We cannot see the force of gravity, but its laws are revealed when an object falls downward through space. Try to see the imprint in the air that its trajectory leaves. So we are invited to pay heed to those languages—the language of trees, the language of the sea, the language of birds in flight—to become aware of the imprints of passing and past movements that surround us, not hastily but with an ear receptive to listening to other people, other landscapes, before and after they pass on.
