Clément Cogitore Chases a Ghost Island in Paris

At Galerie Nathalie Obadia, the French artist turns a forgotten volcanic island into a meditation on memory, power, and disappearance

French artist and filmmaker Clément Cogitore opens Ferdinandea, his first solo exhibition with Galerie Nathalie Obadia, on September 5, 2026. The show runs through October 31 at the gallery’s Paris space, 3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, in the 4th arrondissement. It centers on a real island that appeared in the Mediterranean in 1831, then vanished within months, leaving European powers scrambling to claim a piece of land that no longer existed. After touring institutions in Naples and Marseille, this capital iteration arrives as a sharp spatial configuration, inviting visitors to physically experience how images, memory, and power intersect.

Who Is Clément Cogitore?

Born in Colmar in 1983, Clément Cogitore trained at the École supérieure des arts décoratifs in Strasbourg, then at Le Fresnoy, the French national studio for contemporary art. Since then, he has built a career that moves between contemporary art and cinema. His films, videos, and installations return again and again to collective memory, ritual, and the sacred. They also question how people inhabit the world today.

Recognition came fast for Clément Cogitore. By 2018, his work had earned him the Marcel Duchamp Prize, one of France’s most respected honors for contemporary art. The same year he began teaching at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, where he still runs a film workshop today. His reach soon extended beyond the gallery and into opera. When he staged Rameau’s Les Indes galantes at the Opéra national de Paris in 2019, the New York Times named it one of that year’s best productions. This past summer, he returned to the stage, directing Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. Along the way, his films and installations have found a permanent home in major collections, from the Centre Pompidou to the Louis Vuitton and Daimler art collections.

Inside Ferdinandea

The island at the heart of the exhibition surfaced between late June and mid-July 1831, off the coast of Tunisia. Underwater volcanic activity pushed it above the waterline in the Strait of Sicily. Nearby residents feared a sea monster had woken. Scientists, meanwhile, rushed to study the new land. More than a mere historical footnote, Cogitore treats this ephemeral terrain as a phantom archive. Within weeks, Britain, France, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies all claimed the island for its strategic position. It carried four different names, Ferdinandea, Julia, Graham, Nerita. Each one a small attempt to possess something that refused to be held. Then, just months later, it sank back beneath the sea.

Clément Cogitore never simply documents this history. Instead, he stages it, then lets fact and fiction blur together within the gallery’s walls. Ferdinandea opens with a 16mm film, Prémonitions, that never actually shows the island. A table is set with a teapot, plates, and a sugar bowl. Slowly, the teapot turns black, and fish drift loose in the current. Philosopher Federico Leoni has described this kind of image as a “pure sign”. Something visible, yet not yet ready to explain itself. Nothing here confirms the island exists, but everything already seems to announce it.

Incertitudes

From there, a nine-part video called Incertitudes weaves together English, Italian, Sicilian, Maltese, and Arabic. It traces the island’s colonial history, then shifts into speculative fiction entirely. A third film, Vigilances, follows a camera descending into the sea toward eroded basalt rock. At first, the footage suggests scientific certainty. But the closer it gets, the less solid Ferdinandea becomes, dissolving into algae, fish, and shifting currents. Elsewhere, engraved photographs carry short phrases in several languages, working almost like oracles. In Cendres, a nineteenth-century engraving of the island by Benedetto Marzolla sits submerged in volcanic ash, tying the image directly to the material it represents.

One final detail lingers after the visit. During the original 1831 expedition, scientists placed a seismograph near the submerged island. Decades later, it still listens for tremors that could signal Ferdinandea’s return. By channeling Gilles Deleuze, Leoni argues that an event lives not in what happens, but in everything that happens around it. Ferdinandea, in that sense, was never only a geological accident. It remains a way of thinking about images as fragile appearances, and about the world itself as a surface that could tremble again at any moment.

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Practical information:

Ferdinandea runs September 5 to October 31, 2026, at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, Paris 4e.