Artist, mentalist and passionate about cognitive science, Clément Freze offers here a hybrid lecture, on the border of performance and critical thinking.
Through demonstrations drawn from mentalism, career anecdotes, interactive experiments, and concrete examples, he reveals how our brain creates meaning, elegantly deludes itself… and loves to believe it. Mind reading, intuition, synchronicities, cognitive biases, the Barnum effect, reconstructed memories: mentalism becomes a pedagogical tool for exploring the limits of perception, the flaws in human reasoning, and the mechanisms of credulity. A lecture for those who love to be amazed… without being fooled.
At 28, Clément Freze is one of the most prominent mentalists in the French-speaking world. He discovered hypnosis in 2012 and then mentalism in 2013. Finding his passion (and rediscovering some of the mechanics of his childhood magic tricks), he completely neglected his high school studies to dedicate himself wholeheartedly to perfecting this art, which he finds marvelous. Jotting down dozens of ideas in notebooks, some of which he would only realize ten years later, he used his friends as his first audience to accelerate his self-education.
In 2015, after a rather boozy evening, his friends challenged him to predict the topics of the French baccalaureate exam (which he managed to do through a clever deception). It was also in 2015 that he discovered the work of Michael Moore and became determined to blend illusion with documentary to combat the mental manipulation of which he had been a victim. It was after leaving high school, during the summer of that same year, that he (supported by his lifelong friend Antoine Aresu) began developing the basic elements of his first show, initially called "Mental Action," which was later renamed "Une affaire du XIXe siècle" (A 19th-Century Affair) before finally becoming "La Séance" (The Screening).
Among his many artistic influences are Derren Brown, Alexandre Astier, Michael Moore and many others…
At 28, Clément Freze is one of the most prominent mentalists in the French-speaking world. He discovered hypnosis in 2012 and then mentalism in 2013. Finding his passion (and rediscovering some of the mechanics of his childhood magic tricks), he completely neglected his high school studies to dedicate himself wholeheartedly to perfecting this art, which he finds marvelous. Jotting down dozens of ideas in notebooks, some of which he would only realize ten years later, he used his friends as his first audience to accelerate his self-education.
In 2015, after a rather boozy evening, his friends challenged him to predict the topics of the French baccalaureate exam (which he managed to do through a clever deception). It was also in 2015 that he discovered the work of Michael Moore and became determined to blend illusion with documentary to combat the mental manipulation of which he had been a victim. It was after leaving high school, during the summer of that same year, that he (supported by his lifelong friend Antoine Aresu) began developing the basic elements of his first show, initially called "Mental Action," which was later renamed "Une affaire du XIXe siècle" (A 19th-Century Affair) before finally becoming "La Séance" (The Screening).
Among his many artistic influences are Derren Brown, Alexandre Astier, Michael Moore and many others…
