Catherine Corringer: Body as Enigma in Film and Performance

Catherine Corringer, a former actress turned filmmaker and performance artist, explores the dissolution of gender and genre boundaries through her visceral works. Her early films (2005-2007) — Day’s Night, In Between, This is the Girl — established her as an audacious auteur, depicting sexual identity as fragmented and scarred. In Smooth (2009), awarded at the Porn Film Festival Berlin, she further dissolves gender by reimagining the maternal within the male body. Her performance Scum/Performance, based on Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, blends live art with film, using her body as material and screen in a ritualistic ceremony. The piece contrasts a slow, liturgical physicality with a rapid, post-human recitation of the manifesto. Corringer’s upcoming film Shot will be entirely subjective camera, exploring a world without age or sexual identity. Philosopher Ruwen Ogien cites Spinoza’s “No one knows what a body can do” as the starting point of her work. Corringer lives and works in Paris.