In this excellent review of Julien Creuzet’s work, Skye Arundhati Thomas (Art Review) writes, “In a challenge to the Venice Biennale’s defining principles, the project for the French Pavilion is launched in Martinique.” Julien Creuzet’s project for the French Pavilion is on view in the Giardini, as part of the 60th Venice Biennale, April 20 to November 24, 2024. [Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.]
We are in a windswept, cliffside garden that tumbles down to a glossy ultramarine sea. Ultramarin is also another way of saying outre-mer, the French legal term for persons of ‘overseas territories’. “When I hear ultramarin,” says the artist Julien Creuzet, “I think of someone fantastical, superhuman.” We are in Martinique, in the French Antilles, buffeted on one side by the Caribbean Sea, and on the other by the Atlantic Ocean. Creuzet, raised on the island, will represent France at the Venice Biennale 2024 and has chosen to bring the announcement of his project to Martinique instead of Paris; so here we are, a group of press, about to tour the island. The Négritude movement shaped Creuzet; and today we are in the garden of Édouard Glissant’s former house.
In his speech at the launch of Creuzet’s project, the president of the Executive Council of Martinique, Serge Letchimy, promises to install Creole as an official language of the island alongside French. The métropole prefect Jean-Christophe Bouvier is seated across from him; he is the de facto leader of Martinique. Last year he quashed a petition to officialise Creole: ‘The language of the Republic is French,’ Bouvier said to the local assembly (the final decision is still pending). But Creole is as much ‘the language of the Republic’ as French, because ‘the Republic’ itself is entirely constituted by creolisation, the mixing together of peoples and cultures. At least this was the vision that influenced members of the Négritude movement – Glissant, Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Césaire – who supported Martinique’s remaining a territory of France at the moment of its decolonisation. It was, presumably, a way to hold the coloniser accountable, to turn subjects of the colonies into equal French citizens; France had, after all, been constructed by the labour and resources of its colonies. These Caribbean thinkers understood the process of decolonisation not as a quest for the sovereignty of single nation-states, but as the restructuring of the world itself. This was not simply a matter of geography, but of identity, society, language – where the presumed synthesis of nation, culture and citizenship had to be dismantled and reformed.
Creuzet’s insistence on launching his project for the French Pavilion in Martinique, supported by the Institut Français, follows this instinct. He has carefully planned every aspect of our visit, and assembled a cast: his elders, peers and the island itself. Creuzet makes films, sculptures, performances; he also writes poetry. The films are collage-like assemblages of found footage and animation, brought together with music and poetry. His work is at its best 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, more operatic turns. In an early video, from 2015, Oh téléphone, oracle noir (…), Creuzet films himself in a dark room, a phone flashlight pointing at his face, which is held right up to the lens of the camera. He repeats a poem:
Oh téléphone, oracle noir,
toutes les personnes écrans miroirs,
filent les images tactiles,
oh vas-y voir les nuages du soir.
There is a pulpy rasp to his voice, carried with a tilted intonation, and he swells certain words while softening others. Creuzet’s face has an almost devotional capacity: he blinks tenderly, so close to the camera, the scene is raw, and his voice inflected with agony. It’s the title work of a show at Le Magasin in Grenoble, a precursor to the Biennale pavilion (the details of which remain under wraps at the time of writing). A more recent mixed-media installation, Zumbi Zumbi Eterno (2023), also carries this musical tenor – in a video component, Creuzet sings in a whistling voice, and the poem tells a story. Zumbi dos Palmares was a Brazilian quilombola leader, a resistance fighter who famously revolted against Portuguese slave traders. He was decapitated, his head placed on a spike. In Creuzet’s video a twisted body, a cutlass angled into it, is flung into swirling waters. The body turns luminescent, bleeding flowers as fish pass through it. At Le Magasin, in front of the video, a TV screen is propped vertically against a wall, and on it a translucent figure – inside of which, like an X-ray, we see wires, bottles, cigarettes, sweets – who throws, one at a time, a series of books to the front. These last are Creuzet’s library: Ntozake Shange, Sonia Sanchez, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Wole Soyinka, Maryse Condé and of course Césaire, among others. There is poetry and essays; the languages are many.
As Adam Shatz writes in his new biography, when Fanon was told in school that he owed his freedom to a dead white man he was first stumped, and later enraged. His teacher was referring to Victor Schœlcher, whose book collection the library now houses. In 1802 Napoleon had reinstated slavery (it had been abolished in French colonies in 1794) and its practice was written into the French legal structure; trafficking was sustained even after slavery was abolished again in 1817. In 1848, after a trip through the Americas, Schœlcher petitioned to rewrite the law 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 were only three men on the platform… a white, the governor; a mulatto, who held the parasol for him; and a Negro, who carried his hat.’ A new era of segregation was inaugurated; white settlers refused integration. In many ways, it persists. There is the Martinique experienced by métropole visitors – the beaches, the wood-cabin shacks full of fried fish – and then that of most Martinicans, who have been priced out by the leisure economy. French jurisdiction over the land restricts the formation of local industries, especially of agriculture, and of any trade between the islands. [. . .]
For full review and photos 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.]
In this excellent review of Julien Creuzet’s work, Skye Arundhati Thomas (Art Review) writes, “In a challenge to the Venice Biennale’s defining principles, the project for the French Pavilion is launched in Martinique.” Julien Creuzet’s project for the French Pavilion is on view in the Giardini, as part of the 60th Venice Biennale, April 20
