On this wonderful assessment of Julien Creuzet’s work, Skye Arundhati Thomas (Artwork Overview) writes, “In a problem to the Venice Biennale’s defining rules, the challenge for the French Pavilion is launched in Martinique.” Julien Creuzet’s challenge for the French Pavilion is on view within the Giardini, as a part of the sixtieth Venice Biennale, April 20 to November 24, 2024. [Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.]
We’re in a windswept, cliffside backyard that tumbles all the way down to a shiny ultramarine sea. Ultramarin can also be one other means of claiming outre-mer, the French authorized time period for individuals of ‘abroad territories’. “After I hear ultramarin,” says the artist Julien Creuzet, “I consider somebody fantastical, superhuman.” We’re in Martinique, within the French Antilles, buffeted on one facet by the Caribbean Sea, and on the opposite by the Atlantic Ocean. Creuzet, raised on the island, will signify France on the Venice Biennale 2024 and has chosen to convey the announcement of his challenge to Martinique as a substitute of Paris; so right here we’re, a bunch of press, about to tour the island. The Négritude motion formed Creuzet; and right now we’re within the backyard of Édouard Glissant’s former home.
In his speech on the launch of Creuzet’s challenge, the president of the Govt Council of Martinique, Serge Letchimy, guarantees to put in Creole as an official language of the island alongside French. The métropole prefect Jean-Christophe Bouvier is seated throughout from him; he’s the de facto chief of Martinique. Final 12 months he quashed a petition to officialise Creole: ‘The language of the Republic is French,’ Bouvier stated to the native meeting (the ultimate determination remains to be pending). However Creole is as a lot ‘the language of the Republic’ as French, as a result of ‘the Republic’ itself is completely constituted by creolisation, the blending collectively of peoples and cultures. At the least this was the imaginative and prescient that influenced members of the Négritude motion – Glissant, Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Césaire – who supported Martinique’s remaining a territory of France in the mean time of its decolonisation. It was, presumably, a technique to maintain the coloniser accountable, to show topics of the colonies into equal French residents; France had, in spite of everything, been constructed by the labour and sources of its colonies. These Caribbean thinkers understood the method of decolonisation not as a quest for the sovereignty of single nation-states, however because the restructuring of the world itself. This was not merely a matter of geography, however of id, society, language – the place the presumed synthesis of nation, tradition and citizenship needed to be dismantled and reformed.
Creuzet’s insistence on launching his challenge for the French Pavilion in Martinique, supported by the Institut Français, follows this intuition. He has rigorously deliberate each facet of our go to, and assembled a solid: his elders, friends and the island itself. Creuzet makes movies, sculptures, performances; he additionally writes poetry. The movies are collage-like assemblages of discovered footage and animation, introduced along with music and poetry. His work is at its greatest when it’s dominated by sound: Creuzet is a composer, a musician; he mixes samples and clips like a producer, with sudden sharp notes, drops in rhythm or longer, extra operatic turns. In an early video, from 2015, Oh téléphone, oracle noir (…), Creuzet movies himself in a darkish room, a cellphone flashlight pointing at his face, which is held proper as much as the lens of the digital camera. He repeats a poem:
Oh téléphone, oracle noir,
toutes les personnes écrans miroirs,
filent les photographs tactiles,
oh vas-y voir les nuages du soir.
There’s a pulpy rasp to his voice, carried with a tilted intonation, and he swells sure phrases whereas softening others. Creuzet’s face has an nearly devotional capability: he blinks tenderly, so near the digital camera, the scene is uncooked, and his voice inflected with agony. It’s the title work of a present at Le Magasin in Grenoble, a precursor to the Biennale pavilion (the small print of which stay underneath wraps on the time of writing). A more moderen mixed-media set up, Zumbi Zumbi Eterno (2023), additionally carries this musical tenor – in a video element, Creuzet sings in a whistling voice, and the poem tells a narrative. Zumbi dos Palmares was a Brazilian quilombola chief, a resistance fighter who famously revolted in opposition to Portuguese slave merchants. He was decapitated, his head positioned on a spike. In Creuzet’s video a twisted physique, a cutlass angled into it, is flung into swirling waters. The physique turns luminescent, bleeding flowers as fish cross by means of it. At Le Magasin, in entrance of the video, a TV display is propped vertically in opposition to a wall, and on it a translucent determine – inside which, like an X-ray, we see wires, bottles, cigarettes, sweets – who throws, separately, a collection of books to the entrance. These final are Creuzet’s library: Ntozake Shange, Sonia Sanchez, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Wole Soyinka, Maryse Condé and naturally Césaire, amongst others. There’s poetry and essays; the languages are many.
As Adam Shatz writes in his new biography, when Fanon was advised at school that he owed his freedom to a useless white man he was first stumped, and later enraged. His instructor was referring to Victor Schœlcher, whose ebook assortment the library now homes. In 1802 Napoleon had reinstated slavery (it had been abolished in French colonies in 1794) and its observe was written into the French authorized construction; trafficking was sustained even after slavery was abolished once more in 1817. In 1848, after a visit by means of the Americas, Schœlcher petitioned to rewrite the legislation on slavery in France and its colonies. Victor Hugo describes the scene: ‘When the governor proclaimed the equality of the white race, the mulatto race, and the black race, there have been solely three males on the platform… a white, the governor; a mulatto, who held the parasol for him; and a Negro, who carried his hat.’ A brand new period of segregation was inaugurated; white settlers refused integration. In some ways, it persists. There’s the Martinique skilled by métropole guests – the seashores, the wood-cabin shacks stuffed with fried fish – after which that of most Martinicans, who’ve been priced out by the leisure financial system. French jurisdiction over the land restricts the formation of native industries, particularly of agriculture, and of any commerce between the islands. [. . .]
For full assessment and images of Creuzet’s work, see https://artreview.com/julien-creuzet-beyond-the-shore-venice-biennale-french-pavilion
[Photo (top) by Nicolas Derne, shared by Institut Français: Julien Creuzet welcomes the press at the Cape 110 memorial in Le Diamant, Martinique, 6 February 2024. Second photo by Aurélien Mole. © Magasin CNAC, Grenoble: là haut, nos aïeux, dans nos yeux / là haut, nos aïeux, dans nos yeux (…) (detail), 2023, mixed media. Courtesy the artist.]