Completed PhDs

This project aims 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 is 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 will try to reconstruct the mental, intellectual and tactile universe of the Monkey...

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...

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

Recent scholarship in performance and design studies increasingly acknowledges the agency of light as an artistic medium. However, it often falls short of demonstrating the immediate and tangible impact of this agential force. In response, this doctoral research investigates the physiological effects of coloured light within performative contexts and beyond.

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,...

The practice-based PhD thesis of Kinshuk Surjan arises from a personal dissonance with cinematic portrayals of India’s prolonged agrarian crisis. In the past three decades, more than 400.000 farmers have committed suicide. The thesis argues that a subconsciously inherited, neocolonial gaze on rural India has shaped how Indian farmers have been represented/ignored. This gaze fosters urban indifference and affects policy, enabling the crisis. The PhD therefore asks how a filmmaker can counter...

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.

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. 

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.

I am writing a 'manual for documentary makers'. This is challenging, it would mean 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...

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...