Lately, her research has been revolving around botanical politics and power structures. She has been investigating how systems of meaning have been impressed upon nature, flora, and seeds throughout eras of imperialism, colonialism, and globalisation, resulting in the exhibitions Botany under Influence, apexart, New York, USA (2016); Leave No Stone Unturned [Remuer la terre], Le Cube — independent art room, Rabat, Morocco (2019); Ground Control [Markkontroll], Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden (2020); Planted in the Body, MeetFactory, Prague, Czech Republic (2021); Effet de Serre – Farah Khelil (Recipient of AFAC Visual Grant 2019), Parc du Belvédère, Tunis, Tunisia (2021) accompanied by an eponymous publication, and in the essay Waking Dormant Seeds for Theatrum Botanicum, edited by Uriel Orlow and Shela Sheikh (Sternberg Press, 2018).

In the same line, she is interested in exploring the links between waters, toxicity and circulation, as initiated with Spoiled Waters Spilled, Ballet National de Marseille, Marseille, France in the framework of Manifesta 13, Les Parallèles du Sud (2020). She curated Breaking Water, CAC Cincinnati, USA (2022) diving more into liquid links to protest.

She also curated Alter me, Alter you [Промени ме, променям те] at the Goethe-Institute Sofia, Bulgaria (2018); Olympic Stadium at Le Patio, Paris, France (2018); and the show, performance and night screening Au loin les signaux, al lou’lou’ held during the Heritage Days in the dockyards of L’Anse du Pharo, Marseilles, France (2017).

As an editor, she published driftongue with Clément Faydit and Alexandros Simopoulos (2018), result of a residency in Nuuk, Greenland (2017) – a workshop organised by Hors Pistes between international designers and local craftsmen. She also co-edited with Missla Libsekal In/Visible Voices of Women, an artist’s book on Safaa Erruas, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Nicène Kossentini, Amina Menia and Zineb Sedira (2019).

In 2022, she joins a research residency in Athens around environmental justice and public space with artists Elena Azzedin, Giuliana Grippo and Corinne Silva, and lawyer Xryssa Kapartziani. The same year, Coussonnet is a resident at Villa Ndar, Saint-Louis, Senegal, to investigate the contamination of the river Senegal and the impacts of its alteration on the regional aquatic ecosystems, and, later, at Griffin Art Projects and Polygon Gallery, Vancouver, Canada, pursuing her current research on botanical politics, and waters and contamination. She participated to the seminar Towards Permacultural Institutions. Exercises in Collective Thinking at Stiftung Künsteldorf Schöppingen with Köln’s CCA Temporary Gallery (2022), to the HICP residency in Helsinki with a new research on textile and knowledge production (2019), and to Tate Intensive: The Case for Action at the Tate Modern, in London, UK to rethink institutions (2019), and to Gathering for Rehearsing Hospitalities with Frame Finland in Helsinki talking about gestural, material and corporeal knowledge (2019).

As a curator, Clelia is interested in how visual cultures tackle political, social and spiritual issues in different, or complementary, ways than other disciplines. Through the bias of her political science background, turning her a sort of outsider, her concern originates from her fascination for deconstructing the invisible power structures that shape geopolitics and for understanding resistance strategies to domination patterns. As such, she follows artists who question social norms and conventions, as well as investigate narratives around history, memory and knowledge production and dissemination. Rummaging through the complex and liminal spaces between private/public, integration/isolation, individual/collective and confinement/emancipation is particularly interesting in that framework. In this light, exploring communication structures, codes, language and gestures is also crucial for her.

She is also interested in creating interdisciplinary projects outside of traditional art circuits, particularly in contexts linked to craft or heritage and in spaces previously unused for cultural projects.