Rooted in and routed by means of the Black Atlantic, Julien Creuzet’s exuberant exhibition at Brown College’s The Bell powerfully charts Afro-diasporic presence. Titled ‘Attila cataract your supply on the toes of the inexperienced peaks will find yourself within the nice sea blue abyss we drowned within the tidal tears of the moon’, the present builds on the artist’s eponymous French pavilion presentation on the 2024 Venice Biennale. Encompassing sculpture, video, poetry, efficiency and sound, the set up embodies what Édouard Glissant described in Poetics of Relation (1990) as échos-monde: resonances awakening our positionality throughout rhizomatic connections.
Attila cataract (…) (2024) invitations us into an aqueous world teeming with life and exercise. 4 movies projected on either side of enormous, ceiling-hung panels seem to drift. Whereas Creuzet’s video set up on the French pavilion was screened on single-sided, wall-mounted LED displays, his exhibition at The Bell is a pluri-perspective submergence. Vibrant sea creatures, actual and imaginary, glide by means of a kelp forest; a sea turtle slowly swims by means of a fishing web; Ronde des Amours (1900), Henri Désiré Gauquié’s cupid-adorned streetlight on Paris’s Pont Alexandre III, bobs underneath the water’s floor. Throughout these three video channels, industrial detritus and natural supplies – plastic luggage, bottles, vegetation, feathers – litter the water. Within the fourth video, Jacopo Sansovino’s Neptune (c.1554–67) from Venice’s Palazzo Ducale – a statue conceived to symbolize Venetian dominion over the ocean – is inverted, sinking. Neptune could command the Mediterranean, however we’re within the Atlantic now: these waters belong to completely different gods.
The present’s soundscape includes six percussive songs with poetic lyrics written by Creuzet in French creole; synchronized English, Spanish and Portuguese translations are screened on the gallery’s again wall. Creuzet was born within the suburbs of Paris and raised in Martinique. His convergence of language displays histories of migration, colonization, deterritorialization and reinvention repeatedly unfolding within the Caribbean. ‘Allow us to depart the earth / Onwards to the ocean,’ Creuzet’s lyrics learn. ‘This water / is liberation.’
‘Palmistry of the Needing Waters’ (2024) is a brand new collection of Corten metal ground sculptures laser-cut with animal migration patterns, botanical parts, geological phenomena and molecular diagrams. Two of the sculptures characteristic silhouettes of dancers performing choreographer, anthropologist and activist Katherine Dunham’s L’Ag’Ya (1938), a ballet based mostly on a combat-dance she witnessed whereas conducting ethnographic analysis in Martinique. Martinican ladja originated in African martial arts and was subversively mobilized by enslaved folks not solely to organize for uprisings, but additionally to uphold ancestral traditions and philosophies. As researcher T.J. Desch-Obi noticed in Preventing for Honor (2008), such methods ‘emanated out of […] a complete cosmological system that understood our bodies of water to be bridges connecting the lands of the dwelling and the realm of the useless’. Creuzet’s allusions to ladja fluidly hint such transnational currents of embodied knowledge.
On the opening evening, Creuzet staged Algorithm ocean true blood strikes (2023), a efficiency developed in collaboration with choreographer Ana Pi, at Lindemann Performing Arts Heart. Creuzet and Pi compiled a motion archive based mostly on content material culled from the web: dances connecting Black communities throughout time and house. Within the vibrant efficiency that resulted, our bodies got here collectively and moved aside, ebbing and flowing like ocean tides. About midway by means of, dancers activated three sculptural poles, grande canne qui caresse le ciel et la terre 1, 2 and 3 (Giant Cane that Caresses the Sky and the Earth, all 2023), lusciously lined with fibres and threads hanging like Spanish moss. After the efficiency, these sculptures had been put in at The Bell – immobile besides when the strings catch a breeze. By his complicated, formidable follow, Creuzet constellates photos, sounds, gestures and environments caught in ceaseless flux and transformation.
Julien Creuzet, ‘Attila cataract your supply on the toes of the inexperienced peaks will find yourself within the nice sea blue abyss we drowned within the tidal tears of the moon’, is on view at The Bell, Windfall till 1 June
Important picture: Julien Creuzet, ‘Attila cataract your supply on the toes of the inexperienced peaks will find yourself within the nice sea blue abyss we drowned within the tidal tears of the moon’, 2025. Courtesy: the artist and David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown College; {photograph} Julia Featheringill Pictures
