Clémentine Bedos

A first glimpse of NEW BONES, a new XR experience I co-created with @jamalsterrett @eunjo.lee and @rowe.mohammed I’ve wanted to work with Jamal for a long time. I first heard him speak at Goldsmiths years ago and was deeply struck by the way he described his craft: how he mixes his Asperger’s with Bruk Up, a dance style from Jamaican street culture (from Jamaican patois “bruk up” meaning “broken up”), to find new ways of moving, sensing, and being. Jamal and I began a collaborative process grounded in reciprocity. We met multiple times @goldsmithsuol and @staffordshirest to exchange our embodied practices and esoteric knowledge systems — Bruk Up and Tantra — exploring how they might intersect and influence one another. With the support of @immersivearts_uk , we later attended a week-long residency at the new Centre for Creative & Immersive and eXtended reality @uniportccixr in Portsmouth. There we used their volumetric video, photogrammetry, and motion capture studios to record a 20-minute improvised Bruk Up performance — the longest continuous take they had captured — set to an original ambisonic soundscape by @rowe.mohammed More soon. Watch this space.

This video documents my research residency in Chile’s Atacama Desert with @lwcurrent — an interdisciplinary programme rooted in ecological awareness — which informs my forthcoming exhibition supported by @immersivearts_uk In the Atacama, I used breath as both medium and method — a way to attune to land, memory, and more-than-human rhythms, to heal from colonial fractures. This research gains renewed urgency in the Atacama — part of the so-called “Lithium Triangle” — where ongoing extraction not only endangers the reciprocal relationships the Likan Antay people have sustained with the land for millennia, but also, according to them, disturbs the Earth’s magnetic field and cosmic harmony. Lithium, often called the “white gold” of the “clean” energy transition, powers the tools that increasingly mediate our experiences and storytelling — from EVs and smartphones to drones and VR. It is also used pharmaceutically as a mood stabiliser, revealing hidden entanglements between Big Tech and Big Pharma, where external technologies of perception and control are materially bound to internal tools of emotional regulation. Through this work, I reflect on the ethics of presence and representation, asking whether technologies shaped by extractive logics can be re-appropriated — not just to reveal their embedded violence, but to question the meaning and impact of the “off-ground” perspectives they produce. With deep gratitude to La Wayaka Current and the Likan Antay communities ✨🙏🏽🍃 🎥 CREDITS Camera: @clembedos @ornitorrinko Drone: @ornitorrinko Editing: @clembedos @annadobos Music & Mixing: @rowe.mohammed

Coming up this month at FormaHQ! Clémentine Bedos discusses their latest immersive performance ‘Your Rage is Sacred (maa)’ with Forma’s Antonia Shaw and collaborators Eunjo Lee, Seyi Adelekun, Chooc Ly Tan, Mohammed Rowe, Abhaya Rajani, Eleni Papazoglou, Finchittida Finch, Silbahle Serpent and Janhavi Sharma. Your Rage is Sacred (maa) Clémentine Bedos 19:00 - 22:00 29 February Free entry, RSVP necessary [email protected] Performed in full for the first time in November of 2023 at Goldsmiths Sonics Immersive Media Lab (SIML), ‘Your Rage is Sacred (maa)’ is the realisation of Bedos’ doctoral research, Techno-Tantrik Embodiment: Navigating Oppression and Resistance Through the Creolisation of Ancestral and Emerging Technologies. Drawing on their cross-cultural heritage and experience, Bedos brings disparate ideas and cosmologies into conversation, “creolising” ancestral (meditative visualisations, breathwork, mantra and movement) and emerging technologies (real-time 3D creation, 360 projection, and surround sound), that is, apparatuses which belong to and emerge from different visual regimes. The performance explored the spiritual aesthetics of Tantra to delve into the body - divine instrument of perception and karmic archive - and conjure rage as a catalyst for personal and collective transformation. In their discussion, Bedos and their collaborators will touch upon the entangled agencies and complex web of solidarities that a work like ‘Your Rage is Sacred (maa)’ enacts. They will reflect on their experience of making the work, as well as discussions surrounding technology as cultural practice, the development of Western technology as predicated upon the logic of extractive colonialism, Tantra as an ancestral science, and the parallels between the divine feminine of Sakta Tantra (India) and Ifa (West Africa). ‘Your Rage is Sacred (maa)’ was conceived with the support of Arts Council England, Goldsmiths College, Generation Delta, Goldsmiths CCA, Trans Dimension, Ugly Duck and Forma. 19:00: Doors open 19:30: Short reenactment followed by in-conversation 20:30: Drinks 
🔗More info via link in bio!

#reshare • @nottm_contemp 🚨 Don’t miss this one 👇 📅 Sun 3 May, 11am–4pm Inspired by 19th-century mathematician Ada Lovelace’s integrated approach known as “Poetical Science”, Activating Poetical Science: Mysticism, Tech & Future Poesis is a one-day micro-residency bringing together art, mysticism, technology, and alternative ways of knowing. It also marks the beginning of a longer trajectory toward an exhibition in Spring 2028 exploring these themes. Through talks, performance, and collective reflection, we’ll explore modes of thinking that move beyond purely logical or tech-driven frameworks, honouring intuition and creativity. Featuring: ✨ Dr Isobel Elstob on historical technologies, spiritual knowledge systems, and the history of women in science ✨ @clembedos with an immersive live performance exploring breath as a counter-technology, foregrounding embodiment and collective attunement ✨ @emiialrai on alchemy, the esoteric & contemporary art, examining colonial museum infrastructures and hyper-capitalist aesthetics ✨Livvy Penrose-Punnett & Emma Cocker guiding a closing session on regenerative poesis 🎟️ Free tickets (limited) — book via the link in our bio Image credit: Courtesy of the artist. Still from Of Salt & Breath (2025), Clémentine Bedos with Eduardo Seymour, Anna Dobos, and Mohammed Rowe [ID: Thick white steam rising from geothermal vents against a dark mountain and clear blue sky.]

Sensory Storytelling - Using XR to Connect to the Body Mar 16, 2026 10:00am – 11:00am CT Hilton Austin Downtown - Salon E Touch, breath, viscera, pulsing sound - XR can be much more than a trick of the eye. Meet 4 artists developing revolutionary work supported by the UK’s Immersive Arts. Hear about their groundbreaking work that connects our bodies and senses; a multiplayer VR work redefining menopause (The Baby Factory is Closed); a multisensory dancefloor foregrounding access (Beat Blocks); and explore breath as a symbiotic force fusing VR, networked performance, and biosensitive technologies (Breathscapes).

Final Notes from the Atacama Desert Residency with @lwcurrent (5/5) This one is about preserving our capacity to dream! By the fire, Sandra and Carlos shared stories of ancestral wisdom, including their cosmovision and origin story, how they read the sky to orient themselves and trace the soul’s journey through life and death. The Likan Antay read forms not in the luminous stars themselves, but in the dark space that holds them: a snake, a fox, a shepherd, a partridge, and a llama. The llama constellation, Yakana, is the kamac, the animating force of llamas. In their origin story, the universe is a great belly. At first, there is only obscurity. From that darkness, the first light is born: Pacha Kamaq, emerging through the cosmic womb. That light gives birth to the stars, the moon, the sun and the Earth. Mother Earth arrives as a little girl and grows into a fertile woman. Her children come in order: trees, birds, animals, and finally humans. Humans are “el menor hermano”: the youngest sibling of mountains, birds, trees and animals, unable to live without the care of our elders who give us shelter, food, wool and wood to stay warm, and feathers to adorn ourselves. A reminder to be humble and grateful for all that sustains us. This felt especially resonant with my research in Tantrik philosophy, where the cosmic Mother, Śakti, is the origin of creation, the nurturer, and the one who dissolves form back into the womb of the universe. The night sky, like the dark skin of Kālī, is understood as the cosmic womb, and the temple’s innermost sanctum or womb chamber (garbhagriha) is a space of rebirth into that primordial darkness: the place before conditioning and separation. This informs the VR experience I am currently developing with an incredible team of collaborators, supported by @immersivearts_uk What about you? What do you dream of when looking at the night sky? What do you notice in the dark space between things, thoughts, breaths? Comment ‘belly’ if you would like to be the first informed about the VR experience we are co-creating 💫 📷 1st photo by the ever-so-talented Eduardo Seymour @ornitorrinko ✨🌌

This line from Kabir has been living on my wall for a few years now… and it still reveals something new every time I look at it ✨ I’d love to know what it brings up for you. How do you understand it? Tell me in the comments 🙏🏽

Notes from the Atacama (4/5) For our final sharing @layareta.sanpedrodeatacama , I performed a text I had written the night before, titled Aspiration, inspired by a passage in Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake. I performed wearing one of the ceramic bellies I made from wild clay collected in the dried riverbed of the Ayllu de Coyo. It felt vulnerable then, and still feels tender to share today. Under racial capitalism, our elemental needs, which include access to clean and breathable air, are structurally denied. Racial and class politics of unbreathing mean that the lungs of humans, of other species, and of the planet, are under attack. In Tantra, a lineage I access through my grandmother Jeanne, prāṇa is not merely the biological function of breathing nor a functional life force, but rather it is understood as the living, intelligent movement of consciousness through embodied life. Each inhale is treated as an auspicious arrival, a visitation of life itself. In this perspective, the pause between breaths is a gateway, a door that opens inward to the deepest form of attention and the simplest form of prayer. A void that is full with presence. The practice of breath retention, kumbhaka, thus invites deep reverence and love towards prāṇa, that is blessing us with its presence: learning to attune to its arrival, its disappearance, and its return. The pause that teaches us we are alive, and remembers the ones who are no longer here, in the knowing that they will return 💫🫁🌊 Deep gratitude to @lwcurrent team for their deep generosity and care 🙏🏽 🎥 captured by the talented @ornitorrinko

Notes from the Atacama (3/5) On day one of the residency with @lwcurrent in the Atacama Desert, we woke at 4am for ayni, a ritual of reciprocity with the Earth, led by Carlos, our host, a yatiri (healer) from the Likan Antay community. As the sun slowly rose from behind the Andes, revealing the silhouette of the mountain range, we offered breakfast to the Earth through ‘la boca de la tierra’. We introduced ourselves and asked permission to be on this land. During my stay, I made a series of bellies using wild clay collected from the dry riverbed of the Ayllu de Coyo. I imprinted them with the medicinal plants from Sandra and Carlos’s garden: chaňar, pimiento, and chilca, whose sticky resin is licked and applied to the skin like a natural bandage, known to ease bruises and relieve menstrual pain. This series is an homage to the matriarchal culture of the Linkan Antay, to La Madre Tierra who feeds us all, and to the śakti energy we hold in our bellies, as a reminder that this is the center of our wild powers, where courage lives, at the core, a core-rage we must access to survive under hetero-colonial Patriarchy. It is a reminder that ‘the emancipation of the wombs of the Earth is also a way to reconnect to Mother Earth’ (M.Ferdinand, Decolonial Ecology) I called this triptych of wearable ceramic belts “Libertad de vientres”. I wore one of them, still unfired, for a performance during our final sharing at La Yareta in San Pedro de Atacama, where I held my breath in remembrance of the people of this Earth who had been deprived of air. We fired them in the soil, covered with lama lung, but they didn’t survive the fire despite my prayers and offering of coca leaves and wine to the Earth. The Earth swallowed them back, teaching me once again that all creations eventually return to the Earth. With love to Maca, Sey, Carlos, Sandra, Victor and Sophie, for your teachings, guidance, and generosity 🙏🏽✨🌄 More soon x

Notes from the Atacama (2/5) Here are a few photos of petroglyphs from the Atacama Desert, where I was on a research residency with @lwcurrent last April, along with images from Valle del Arcoíris where I went with my fellow resident @majo.caporaletti and our guide Pablo, and the stunning oasis of Guatín where we swam surrounded by hundreds of dragonflies and by century-old cactus lovingly called “los abuelos”, the grandfathers. There’s something so liberating about feeling minuscule in a landscape like this. It calms the nervous system and quiets the mind, reminding me that it’s not all on me to figure out, that I can surrender into what is far vaster than me. Not many people know my mum was an Egyptologist. I grew up lulled to sleep by stories of hieroglyphs and the belief that drawing holds a kind of magic. I’ve become fascinated by cross-cultural resonances: across continents and millennia, humans mark stone with the same gestures: animals, medicine people in cross-legged position, bodies adorned in ritual gathering, arms lifted to the sky in prayer. Land remembers. And we remember ourselves through it. With deepest gratitude to Maca, Sey, Carlos, Sandra, Victor and Sophie. Gracias por todo ✨🌵 More soon x 📸 1st pic by @francescamts

As 2025 comes to an end, I’m reflecting with deep gratitude on everything this year offered. I still can’t quite believe that in April, a last-minute invitation from @lwcurrent brought me to the Atacama Desert, where I spent a month of research with the Likan Antay community. I anticipated a place harsh to humans, a desert of extremes: dryness, altitude, blazing days and freezing nights. Instead, I immediately felt held by the land, swaddled by the sacred Andean mountains and volcanoes surrounding the Ayllu de Coyo, on the outskirts of San Pedro de Atacama. The more time I spent there, the more it became clear how deeply relevant this place is to my current research on breathing. At Tebenquiche, I encountered the “primordial soup” from which extremophilic organisms released, 3.8 billion years ago, the oxygen that formed the ozone layer. The reason any of us can breathe. This sacred site, where the Likan Antay once practised ancestral breathing rituals at sunrise, was almost destroyed by mining interests. With @majo.caporaletti , I also visited El Tatio. We arrived at dawn and watched the Earth breathe, geyser streams rising like prayers from the planet’s core. In the Atacama, the land’s aliveness is undeniable, from seismic tremors (I felt my first earthquake) to the breathing earth-steam of geysers. As the certainties of the twentieth century continue to crumble, this place reminds us that the Earth is trembling, the Earth is speaking. And perhaps we, too, must allow a tremor within ourselves, to step beyond the supposedly known, to shake off fixed, extractive ideas and remember our symbiotic relationship with a living planet. In the words of Édouard Glissant, “Trembling thinking is the instinctual feeling that we must refuse all categories of fixed and imperial thought. Tremblement is thinking in which we can lose time, lose time searching, in which we can wander and in which we can counter all the systems of terror, domination, and imperialism with the poetics of trembling. It allows us to be in real contact with the world and with the peoples of the world.” Endless gratitude to Carlos, Sandra, Maca, Sey, Sophie and Victor 🙏🏽✨🫁

Pictured here is Metamorph by Clémentine Bedos (@clembedos ), a wearable sculpture consisting of brass finger extensions mounted on a 3D-printed TPU cast of ǎssia ghendir’s hand. The piece develops from Bedos’s earlier collaborative project Metamorph (2022) with Holly Hunter, Verity Coward and ǎssia ghendir, which drew on the classical myth of Daphne, the nymph who transforms into a laurel tree to escape rape by the god Apollo. Bedos is a London-based transmedia artist. Drawing from a diverse ancestry (Haitian, Gitane, Kabyle, European) and a background in law, philosophy, and fine arts, Bedos’ practice explores the interrelated phenomena of mind, body, and consciousness within hegemonic systems of identity. Disrupting colonial logics, their work reorients aesthetic focus inward, reclaiming the body, its sensuality, and inner visuality as sites of emancipation and non-duality. Clémentine Bedos Metamorph brass, 3D-printed TPU, steel base with black velvet 37 x 25cm 2025 Metamorph is exhibited as part of our fundraiser exhibition, A Moment In Time, now live on The Vincent Collective. See this piece in person and book your ticket via the link in our bio. 📷 Photo by Jack Elliot Edwards @jackelliotedwards #VanGoghHouse #ArtistEditions #BuyArt #LondonArt #FundraiserExhibition #Sculpture #London #ArtExhibition