Clarinde Michaela explores how moving in and through the world creates the potential for individual and collective bodies to connect with one another. Starting from the proposition that knowing takes place through bodily movement, Clarinde distances herself from Western philosophical traditions of dance, the mind–body duality, and the colonizing politics embedded within them. She draws on feminism, ecological cognitive science, phenomenology, and new materialism to investigate how knowledge is neither static nor storable. Thinking is a physical act.
Clarinde Michaela’s performances, films, maps and installations are a disruption, a call to shatter the systems that dictate our perceptions, temporal experiences and bodies. At the same time, it is a coming and bringing together. As a choreographer, dancer, and visual artist, her practice inquires into interconnectedness as a lived experience. By invoking how reciprocity shapes reality, her work moves beyond anthropocentric boundaries, questioning entrenched separations between mind and body and humans, machine and nature. With a body that has learned to attune itself to the unpredictability of external forces, Clarinde’s work beckons us to dismantle the dominance of control and embrace a world where connection is a constant presence.
info@clarindewesselink.com
Texts:
→ Being as Knowing by Susan Leigh Foster, 2025
→ Rooted, Dr. Nathanja van den Heuvel, 2023
→ The Reason I Move, Peter Manson, 2022
→ De Groene Amsterdammer, Column, 2022