Completed PhD Research

Interdisciplinary Body research explored the relationship between bodies on screen, viewers, and cinematic conventions, asking how audiovisual works engage the body and how filmmakers shape this interaction. Drawing on psychoanalytic film theory, such as the mirror stage or the concept of gaze, the research examined how viewers identify with on-screen bodies. Identification, which operates not only through narrative empathy but also via pre-reflective, bodily resonance, informed by mirror neurons and haptic visuality.

The project combined audiovisual experimentation with theoretical reflection. Two core outputs – Bile, an essay film, and Limbo: The Earth Is Hard, a three-channel experimental installation – probe the cinematic gaze and the body’s vulnerability under extreme physical states such as illness, death, and suffering. Bile investigates illness and death, juxtaposing imagery from hospitals and morgues with personal narration and home video material. Collaborating with the Medical Imaging Research Center (MIRC) provided access to medical imaging, treated here as a hyper-documentary – objective yet alienating, reducing the body to visual objecthood while creating tension for empathy and identification. Limbo: The Earth Is Hard applies similar methods to experimental fiction, exploring the intersections of climate, death, and sexuality. Both works use disjunctive montage, fragmented narrative, sensorial sound, and haptic visuality to destabilize conventional viewer perspectives. Rather than asserting control, these films invite the spectator’s body and psyche to actively shape meaning.

The accompanying writing mirrors this process through essayistic, fragmented texts combining theoretical reflection with poetic and personal responses. References range from Cixous and Marks to Foucault, Mulvey, and contemporary film and performance art, all approached through current sociopolitical contexts (anno 2022).

The research outcomes have been presented internationally through film festivals (IDFA, Hot Docs, Imagining Science, et al.), exhibitions, publications and conferences.

This PhD in the Arts offers an in-depth reflection on the thoughts and creative process of his film N, The Madness of Reason.

The film addresses the confrontation between the Western mind and African reality and spirituality (primarily West Africa). The film's starting point is the life and work of French encyclopedist Raymond Borremans (1906-1988) who wrote Le grand Encyclopédie de la Côte d'Ivoire. His goal was to objectify and systematize African reality. He spent his life working on it, however at the time of his death, he had only reached the letter N.

The PhD is conceived as a triptych whose center panel consists of the film itself and the two side panels with texts that attempt to reveal the film in different ways. The first panel traces the research, thought and creative process of the film N, The Madness of Reason. We reconstruct the thoughts of the filmmaker, from the original idea to its completion, and this from different perspectives: (1) a historical perspective: who was Raymond Borremans? (2) an epistemological perspective: in what respect does the work subscribe to the encyclopedic tradition of the Enlightenment? (3) a sociological-anthropological perspective: to what extent does Borremans' spirit reflects itself in contemporary West Africa? (4) a spiritual perspective: how can the spiritual dimension of reality be represented in a non-cognitive and non-colonial way (5) a political perspective: is there a connection between encyclopedic thinking and violent identity thinking in Côte d'Ivoire? (6) finally, an artistic perspective: how can these findings be translated into artistic practice?

The second part of the PhD contains my personal philosophy and poetics as a documentary filmmaker, showing how fiction and reality, the real and the imaginary, the visible and the invisible are two sides of the same Reality. Finally, I conclude with a chapter on the confusiing relationship between ethics and aesthetics within documentary praxis and the role the documentary filmmaker plays in our society.

This project aimed to uncover the interferences between the seventeenth-century visual regime, the knowledge-theoretical context of the time and the artistic praxis of Baroque theatre. The starting point for this research was the life and work of John Wilmot (1647-1680), nicknamed The Monkey and also Earl of Rochester at the court of Charles II. Various researchers with an artistic and/or scientific background tried to reconstruct the mental, intellectual and tactile universe of the Monkey from three angles: 1. an art-historical angle that attempted to uncover the visual grammar of the Baroque (and its transhistorical repercussions); 2. a philosophical angle that examined the influence of various dissident intellectual currents in seventeenth-century Europe; and 3. a science-historical angle that examined the knowledge-theoretical influence of various scientific developments on the visual regime of the time. The Monkey's work will thus be radically embedded in its environment. On the basis of the findings of this cultural-historical research, an interface was created which playfully - in accordance with Baroque poetics - made these data available and above all usable. This interface was the working tool in the actual artistic research, where attempts were made to give the cultural-historical findings a concrete form in an artistic event.

Sanja Mitrović is an internationally acclaimed theatre director and performer from Serbia (formerly Yugoslavia), living in Brussels. Sanja Mitrović's PhD in the arts consists of four live performances and a discursive section in which theatre is transformed into a field of artistic and social experimentation. In Truth in Translation: The Art of Directing, Mitrović closely observes the creative processes by which reality is transformed into fiction, the most diverse ways in which this happens, and its artistic potential. Mitrović analyses a number of her earlier productions, as well as new work she created as part of her PhD programme. She also reflects on more than twenty years of artistic practice, focusing specifically on the interpretation and representation of reality through documentary strategies, aesthetic choices and choreographic means. By interweaving personal narrative, historical context and practical experience, Truth in Translation: The Art of Directing offers both a retrospective view and a contemporary assessment of the affinities and ideas that shape Mitrović's idiosyncratic methodology. The artistic part of the PhD comprises the following productions: Danke Deutschland - Cảm ơn nước Đức (2019), with the ensemble of Schaubühne Berlin and the Vietnamese immigrant community in Germany; Working Songs No.1 (2021), in collaboration with Ancienne Belgique in Brussels, Demeter Calling (2021), co-produced by Koninklijke Vlaamse Schouwburg KVS); and Unter Grund (2023), for Schauspiel Dortmund.

The Film Director as Archivist, a doctoral project in the arts, investigates with the aid of existing archive material the relationship between factual and artistic representations of history. At the root of the study is the collection of archive film about Brussels held by Cinematek, the Royal Belgian Film Archive. I have used that archive material in my artistic research in a variety of ways.

One early challenge was to make a selection of archival lm about Brussels from the Cinematek collection for the DVD Brussels, a city caught on lm, a selection that illustrates Brussels’ past historically and aesthetically. As editor of the DVD I took on the role of archivist and in that sense remained faithful to the original material, from both a historical and an aesthetic point of view.

As a researcher and lfilmmaker I also took on another challenge by making a fictional film about Brussels, with the same archival material as a starting point. The result is the found footage film Night Has Come, compiled like a mosaic from the main character’s memories. The archival material gives visual form to those memories. The way in which the memories are shaped in the fllm is a metaphor for the operation of human memory. The main character’s memory is far from straightforward. His recollections are subject to selectivity, distortion, fragmentation, repetition and forgetting.

A third challenge lay in the writing of the book Restitution. In it I tell the life story of Raymond Devaux, maker of a series of family films that I used in Night Has Come. In the book I investigate the relationship between historical ction and history in the representation of historical sources. I also study the relationship between fact and fiction by drawing upon non-existent sources, such as a manuscript by Raymond Devaux that I wrote myself, and on existing material that gains a new significance in a different context, such as my series of portraits Tipping Point, supposedly painted by Devaux.

Filmmaker Ellen Vermeulen stayed in Kurdistan, Turkey, during the city wars of 2015 to prepare a film about young people on the threshold to armed resistance. The film aimed to explore what drives someone to make such a radical choice and to depict the conditions leading to a departure to the mountains.

Vermeulen found herself amidst a fertile breeding ground: guerrillas and rebellious youth had seized Kurdish towns in defiance of severe repression, sparking fierce counter-violence. The state employed every means, sparing no lives.

Returning from this threshold, Vermeulen realized the proposed film was impossible. Discussing these disruptive events seemed legally and ethically unfeasible, and in the meantime, the characters had disappeared: they were killed, jailed, or had returned to the mountains.

How does one articulate a situation that feels utterly hopeless, where the only perceived refuge seems to be the mountains? How can these events still be made accessible and shareable? How to talk about this circle of violence?

The artistic research questions the position of the filmmaker in relation to these disruptive events and the rebellious and resilient characters.

This research was presented in the form of a text and a visual essay, titled Restless Stones.

The boy under the portrait of the martyr. Narrative strategies to represent the circle of violence, when the need to visualise collides with ethical boundaries.

I’m an Artist / filmmaker and otaku. Otaku is a Japanese term for people with obsessive interests, commonly Anime, Manga and Japanese pop/sub-culture. It has been compared with mental sickness: ‘They’ say we’re perverted by imagery and moe, we lack basic social skills, empathy, even self-awareness.

To me otaku culture is not a symptom of entertainment consumerism, neither is it a disease; it’s a global avant-garde that can offer strategies to cope with (and survive) our current state of postmodern myopic. Today we are confronted with the first signs of what will become a highly complex, multilayered and super dense technological environment. Already now image and world are in many cases just versions of each other. Otaku are extremely aware of this and see image and life as one: Animated Life. A self-improving mind set that is able to (re-)question identity, sexuality and our relationship with technology and future forms of life.

Animated Life is our relationship with a 2D significant other. It is that moment when Anime becomes aware of the gaze, when voyeurism is answered with seduction, when a character comes alive ...

Otaku is not an escape from reality; it’s a choice for a better fiction than reality, the fiction shared most widely. I research these potential(s) and create audio-visual art and books as vessels of cultural exchange: Visual anthropology on the islands of our modern day Crusoe.

I have been writing a 'manual for documentary makers'. This was challenging, it means that there are methods, advices, rules for the 'good' documentary. It goes without saying that the manual is rather a book full of questions and concerns. An attempt to approach the documentary in a holistic way. The documentary: 'The history of the pig (within us)' is included in the handbook as a 'case'; and is analogous to the handbook in the sense that also in the documentary a holistic approach is at issue. Both handbook and documentary are greedy, broadly based and contemplative.

The intertitles I use as a structure for the handbook leave nothing and everything to the imagination:

- Ars longa, vita brevis - prologue
- Writing a handbook
- If we did not have to deal with that damn god in ourselves, we might want to be excellent people!
- Beauty is!
- A man of goodwill ...
- The fictional, the documentary and the art
- Genres, styles and speech confusion
- Reality, truth and truthfulness
- The sound of music
- Speaking spirits
- A lookout for hunters
- Lessons in documentary making - a handbook
- Money, L. v. Beethoven and the provisional end
- Fatigue, numbness, confession - epilogue

During four years, in order to obtain a PhD in the Arts at RITCS/VUB, experimental filmmaker Maurits Wouters has been researching the subject of fading collective memories in relation to the aesthetics of analog film. Wouters started his research with a collection of home videos made by the derelict community around 'Het Bels Lijntje'; the popular name of the Tilburg - Turnhout train line, constructed in 1865 and shut down in 1973. The family history of Maurits Wouters is closely linked to 'Het Bels Lijntje'.

A Personal Trajectory

'From the start of my artistic PhD, I have been interested in analog home video. I associate it with my childhood and family history and in this way, I see this research as an investigation of my roots. Furthermore, I wanted to work with a specific collection of home videos; namely the tapes that document the life around 'Het Bels Lijntje, a lost railway track between Tilburg and Turnhout. This material brought me closer to my family history', says Wouters.

'From the start I have been preoccupied with different questions. First of all I wanted to know how people used analog home video to literally "ìmagine" 'Het Bels Lijntje. In 1995, analog video got replaced by it`s digital variant and because of this analog video became a memory in itself. What is the influence of this deprecated medium on the filmed images? How do we look at these analog videos in our digital times and what impact does it have on the experience of watching? My interest in analog home video is intricately linked to the questions I ask myself about my own profession as a filmmaker; how can I as a young maker of films, use this medium in an artistic way? '

'Analog home video doesn't exist as such. It is more an amalgam of different carriers of memory in which it's not the cultural practice of filming that forms the fundament. It is the video tape itself, as carrier, which becomes important', Wouters clarifies. 'On top of that the videos are of inferior quality which is also an important characteristic. When a video gets copied, a part of itscontent gets lost. Such a tape wasn't made to be copied, read and shared; one only wants to cherish the memory. Upon inquiry, the owners of these tapes admitted that they had hardly been looked at. They are only an object of remembrance, rather than a historical document. Often people kept their tapes in boxes that looked like the leather cover of a book. In this way, VHS seemed the next link within the tradition of storytelling even though that tradition was already finding it's end point at that time. It seems like the value lies primarily in the act of filming itself, more than in the transferral. This act of filming prevails on the final visible result. '

Two experimental films- The Road Back and The Movement of Phill Niblock- form the result of Wouters`research process. In these films the imagination of nature and landscape play an important role in supporting memory.