Initially from Martinique, Julien Creuzet introduced his distinctive French-Caribbean voice to the French Pavilion at this yr’s Venice Biennale the place he displays on the ocean as each a horizon of alternative and a risk, a spot of therapeutic and life in addition to loss of life and struggling. In Venice, Creuzet envisioned a pavilion the place ‘abroad territories’ and the ‘ultramarine’ merge right into a fluid dimension, evoking our embryonic origins in water and humanity’s dependence on this important component. His work, titled Attila cataracte ta supply aux pieds des pitons verts finira dans la grande mer gouffre bleu nous nous noyâmes dans les larmes marées de la lune (or “Attila cataract your supply on the ft of the inexperienced peaks will find yourself within the nice sea blue abyss we drowned within the tidal tears of the moon”) reads like a poem that connects historic mythologies and suggests a steady movement of narratives and spiritualities born from intercultural change.
“We have to take into account which is the primary and oldest reminiscence a toddler has, as an embryo, earlier than delivery,” Creuzet informed Observer. “That is an immersive expertise contained in the liquid—the liquid of maternity and life. Generally, after we take a shower and go to the seashore, kind of unconsciously, we will really feel once more and retrieve reminiscences about that, particularly when our physique is floating contained in the water.”
Constructing on this idea, Creuzet has created an immersive multimedia and multisensory set up that blends sound, video and sculpture to discover the myths of hybrid societies. Sculptural threads dangle from the ceiling, wealthy in texture and pigment, unraveling throughout the area like an intricate forest of lianas or a coral cluster. These threads seize relics of human civilization entangled within the currents of nature and historical past. In crafting this sensory confluence of narratives and sensations, Creuzet has cast a radical imaginary that invitations connection to the divine, ancestral and, concurrently, to Venice, with its canals and maritime legacy.
In Creuzet’s work, water—significantly because it manifests in seas and oceans—serves as a automobile for the continual movement of historical past, the motion of individuals, energies and concepts shaping new kinds. The mysterious narrative he weaves throughout the area embraces water as a repository of collective reminiscences and traumas but additionally as a realm of initiation, therapeutic and regeneration. As Creuzet recollects, though he was born and raised within the suburbs of Paris, his household took him again to Martinique earlier than he was even a month previous to have his first saltwater bathtub—a ritual of reconnection and the continuation of household heritage.
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His evolving mythopoiesis by way of video, poetry and sculpture unfolds throughout media with a boundless movement, the place creativeness permits him to faucet into and reactivate timeless archetypes and symbols in a cross-cultural dimension. This hybridization of traditions ends in the creation of latest mythological beings. As Creuzet explains, the deities and demons of the ocean that fluctuate across the pavilion have been conceived by way of in depth analysis by him and his studio into varied mythological and non secular traditions tied to the ocean. “We did quite a lot of analysis on how totally different civilizations conceived representations and mythologies about water. It’s a mythology we discover in every single place, with totally different names, as an innate necessity throughout geographies.”
Digital animation and new applied sciences function highly effective instruments in Creuzet’s arms, bringing his envisioned creatures to life as common hybrids that embody varied symbologies and traditions. These traditions have lengthy sought to signify the mysterious forces and energies of the ocean. As Creuzet famous throughout our dialog, monotheistic and polytheistic religions, significantly animism, as soon as tried to depict these forces as deities or demons. At this time, in a society that has largely misplaced religion in faith, it appears artists are among the many few who can nonetheless create magical representations. This skill is essential for serving to us visualize the unknown forces of nature and, extra importantly, for imagining totally different futures. Artists maintain a novel connection to the ancestral, with the flexibility to increase the previous’s actuality into the longer term.
Constructing on this concept, Creuzet has reimagined the statue of Neptune atop the staircases at Palazzo della Dogana in Venice. He defined that Neptune has symbolically entered the pavilion, embodying his classical function because the god of the ocean and his cosmic connections. Different sculptural parts within the pavilion evoke historic relics and remnants of a civilization misplaced to the ocean. But the whole lot within the pavilion exists in a suspended, liquid, embryonic area the place previous, current and future converge. The artist’s creativeness, manifesting on this multisensory expertise, invitations guests to immerse themselves and float between these dimensions.
The artist mirrored right here that his Caribbean id permits him to navigate and function extra consciously inside these fluid, hybrid dimensions. Édouard Glissant’s idea of “Creolization” illustrates this nicely—the Caribbean’s historical past, with its composite inhabitants, exemplifies the fertile melting pot of cultures, deities and traditions that arose from centuries of motion, colonization, migration and commerce.
“I feel to be a Caribbean particular person is about this universalism,” stated Creuzet. “Just because the Caribbean is a substantial mixing of various civilizations.” But on the identical time, this hybrid actuality appears to be the one viable place for these in exile or distanced from a singular nationwide perspective. Like Ovid writing Metamorphoses whereas in exile, Creuzet added, this detachment from dominant narratives opens the door to discover broader common themes.
“Up to date artwork is a query of metamorphosis, a possible metamorphosis of society’s imaginative and prescient,” he stated, revealing his method to artwork and this challenge. For him, artwork is an train in radical creativeness. By drawing on the accrued heritage of information and symbologies from varied cultures and historic moments, it will possibly nonetheless form a brand new, significant universe in a common language, casting mild on a extra harmonious future.
Celebrating the boundless imaginative potential of artwork and poetry, the Biennale pavilion Creuzet conceived embraces a pioneering universalism—one already embedded within the Caribbean—that may encourage a wealthy and helpful coexistence amongst various people and entities.
Julien Creuzet’s “Attila cataracte ta supply aux pieds des pitons verts finira dans la grande mer gouffre bleu nous nous noyâmes dans les larmes marées de la lune” is on view by way of November 24.