The France Pavilion: Julien Creuzet

0:04Welcome to Chanel Connects, the Venice Biennale Edition. It's important to be free So who was the fool who didn't recognize it all that time ago? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it is seduction, oh absolutely Just another woman trying to survive So who of them is lying? I wish that were the case Well let's face the terror of the new work then And this is what art is so good at I don't, do you prepare? No, no, no In this season of Chanel Connects we've taken up residence in Italy to go to the center of the art world. Listen in to the artists, curators, thinkers, and makers behind the Venice Biennale, the world's most important exhibition of contemporary art, now in its 60th edition.

0:49Each of our guests is focused on what matters most and what happens next. I'm Yana Peele, Global Head of Arts and Culture at Chanel. Thank you for connecting with us. Could you tell where my head was at when you found me? Me and you went to hell and there just to find peace The poet E. Temple Thurston urged everyone to visit Venice. He said, you've got to see a city of slender towers and white domes sleeping in the water like a mass of water lilies. In this episode, we meet another poet fascinated by water and the connections it creates. Julien Creuset is one of the most talked about artists exhibiting this year in Venice.

1:33Born in a suburb of Paris and raised in Martinique, he's the first French Caribbean artist to represent France at the Biennale. Julien meets with Tate curator Alvin Lee in the opulent surroundings of the Palazzo Pisani Moretta, overlooking the Grand Canal.

1:55Hi, Julien. Hi. I think we should perhaps start by introducing ourselves. So my name is Alvin Lee. I'm curator of international art at Tate Modern. My name is Julien Creuset and I'm a visual artist. Major and congratulations on the French Pavilion. Thank you. What does representing France mean to you? It is really important. It is in a certain way a responsibility, but I just would like to be free and to be what I would like to do, to be a French Caribbean Afro-descendant and what I can keep with me, with my energy, with my identity, and what I would like to share for real with people. And my goal is just share more beauty, imaginary, and people can have a particular experience.

2:44Maybe this experience can be immersive. I think you totally achieved that because freedom was definitely on my mind walking through the sculptural environments and in the pavilion. It's important to be free. The object needs to be free, the history needs to be free to reinvent. You can write again the history, for example. I think your work touches on very painful haunting history of displacement and migration, but also intimacies of the continents through water. Can you speak a little bit about the kind of role of water in this pavilion and in your work in general? The world of water is the spirit of the pavilion.

3:25but at the same time I have like an ambiguity. We don't know if we are in the forest or if we are inside a submarine forest. And that is a strange ambiguity because I work and I share a certain density of objects, of sculpture in the installation group and that needs to question the bodies, how the bodies of the public can move, can position it all the time for sea, for hair, for smell. Your thinking around water is influenced by some French Caribbean thinkers. Can you speak a little bit about that? I have many important thinkers and writers and poets. The first one important is Aimé César, of course, because he opened the idea of the identity that a black person can exist in the beginning of the 20th century.

4:20The second one is Edouard Glissant. He gives some beauty and perspective how it's possible to live together, how you can use a metaphor, for example, of archipelago for explaining the relation we can have together on this type of situation. I know for the French Pavilion, you had your press conference a few months ago at the former house of Edouard Glissant, right? Can you tell us a little bit about that? For me, it was important to have many identities in France to be a French person. And to be a French person can be from Caribbean Highlands, from Martinique, from Guadeloupe, from French Guiana.

5:06And symbolically, I would like to move out of the centre, the political centre, and go to Martinique, in the place of when the thinking can be free. And I think the House of Gleason can represent this type of situation, a place where the thinking can emancipate, the thinking can speak about how it's possible to think about the future. Martinique is like a concentration of many identities. England, for example, and France make a war for a long time for who is the owner, who can use this land like a property. And that it is interesting. It creates like a specific language, creole, mixed with English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, with African language, with the Caribbean, Arawak, the Tainous population.

6:14And this place is where you can find an Afro-Jasporic person, and it is a very complex context. But at the same time, it can be beautiful, and this place creates a singular culture in the music, in the art, in the movement of the bodies. You were talking about Crayoli, the kind of hybridity of Crayoli language, and I think that's very much in your work too. You work across all these different mediums, you know, the skeletal sculptures, and there's also sound and then moving image. Where did it all begin? Was there a particular medium that you started your artistic practice with? I started when I was a teenager with idea to make music, or lyrics for maybe making hip-hop, rap music.

7:02But that opens the idea how it's possible maybe to write more free text and how these texts can be like poetry. And that opens the idea of how hard a specific form, sculpture, installation, video can be in relation. For example, when I'm producing an object, I can produce a sculpture. Sometimes this object is very silent or immobile physically. But when you make this object in relation with music or with video, it can start to give you some other type of information. I like the idea when, for example, you hear a sound and it can affect what you see. When you smell a perfume, you can affect the experience you can have inside the pavilion, for example.

7:58Almost like a synesthesia. One sensory perception triggers another. Like a sound triggers your feeling of a smell or a vision. Immersive place, it is important. Very long, we think how it needs to be silenced. And we go in the museum, we see very silent sculpture. And I would like to change this type of perspective. just opens the possibility how it can be like physically an experience you need to move for example and from for me the relation we need to have with an object it's turn around it's not just look at one point of views because which point of views can be like a possibility to transform your perception is there a particular story to your ring ah you speak about that one yes it's like a a lumpy seashell, have some in the Caribbean ocean and it's like the first brief instrument and the idea of the mythology of the seashell you can put out the bad energy, put out the bad spirit.

9:14And I like this idea we can have with some natural object. I mean, there's so many different kinds of materials in your work too. I'm curious about the setup of your studio. Can you describe your studio settings for us? My studio looks like a secret kitchen. And for me, it's not important to speak about how I organize myself with my team inside the studio. Because I think art is for people to start to think and dream. I like playing with the idea what you see is not the reality. For example, I like the image. Have you been inside the Liberty Statute in New York? You know what? All these years I lived in the US, I've never seen the Statue of Liberty myself.

10:05What you see outside and what the statute looks like, it's really different inside. Inside it's a very precarity constriction, and that is really interesting. Sometimes the perspective people can have about art, it's like a magical tour or a magical representation. What you see is not obligated to choose. It's the idea of the cinema and the fiction. For example, when you see this type of image of this landscape, the relation between the sun not exactly need to be similar and don't need to be the same way. You can make like a confrontation between two universes. What you see, what you hear can create like a chaotic relation and that can be interesting from an experience.

11:03The theme of the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale is Foreigners Everywhere by the curator Adriano Pedrosa. Can you talk a little about how this theme has informed your pavilion? The title of the Biennale is interesting. and I think it's how it's possible to inverse or reverse the polarity of the earth for example, the north and the south that it is maybe in a certain point of view interesting when we are in Europe in the same time we just meet this week and that it is interesting in a certain way I'm the other, I'm foreigner for you and you are foreigner for me. What is your reality and how you negotiate with your identity?

11:58How you negotiate with the emotion of your identity? Wow, that's a tough question. So I kind of grew up in China, Singapore and the US. I moved to the US when I was around 15. I'm queer and I think I spent many years trying to assimilate and let go of my Chinese identity. And I mean identity is a fiction, which is something I've learned so much from thinking about queer theory, performativity. And I think these different forms of otherness have always kind of informed my effective approach to being in the world. It's a fiction and I feel like it's constantly being rewritten from these different experiences.

12:41And when you visit exhibition, do you question your identity? I feel like I don't have a fixed identity that I hold on to in any kind of experiences. I think being in between that in-between space of all these othernesses, that's where I feel the most comfortable. I do feel like every time I come to Venice, I'm in this fiction where this art world just goes island hopping and palazzo hopping water. Did you have time to kind of see some of the other pavilions? Not from the moment, but during the time I was in Venice, I visited many museums. We go to a museum with my friends, see some old object, old reality about Venice and Italian history.

13:31we go to Palazzo Ducale, maybe see Neptune statue in the stair. And you can see the statue inside the pavilion, in the rivers, in the last room inside the ocean. It's beautiful, yeah. So we're sitting inside Palazzo Pisani Moretta. Could you describe this environment for us? We have too much place for to be two persons in this room and that it is really particular and I think we are very lucky to have this type of experience. I think this place, this artist structure speaks about another type of temporality and I like to mention when we are. And I like to mention we are in 2024. All the time I think that it is important to fix a certain type of temporality for understanding.

14:38I don't have a particular relation with this type of place, but it can be like a situation for discuss specifically in Venice. Because Venice has a long history with art, with beauty, since 100 years, maybe a bit more. It started in 1884, I think, the first bang. Since you're talking about temporality, I love the temporal aspect of your work. My question is, do you spend more time thinking about the past or the future, or is that there's not really a distinction for you? I live my present. And for understanding my moment, I need to know more about my history, the history we can share together of this planet, for example, and different specific situations of the past.

15:34The past is like giving some perspective for the present and trying to make some proposal. When I give one installation and I make one exhibition and I'm producing like a soundtrack, a sculpture or performance, I do it in my present. And in the same time, maybe it can be like a suggestion for the future. Speaking of proposal, could you describe the proposal that is your French Pavilion to us in perhaps one sentence? I would like mix different temporality, different localization and make like a new geolocalization or a new geohistorical localization. It's this reason I'm used, for example, monument from Paris, monument from Venice.

16:34I'm used different language and I'm trying to open my identity and say, okay, I have all this information. inside me. And if I'm trying to describe and take this line or this line, maybe I can create a specific place, a specific moment for our unique experience. Well, it's been amazing to meet you finally in person. I would love to visit your studio one day. Is that possible? Yes, Alvin. Yes, we can do a sharing moment soon in Paris. If you are in town, just let me know and we can organize this type of visit. Thank you so much for these interviews. And it's really important for me to have this possibility to share the emotion of my work and the French pavilion for the 60th edition of the Venice Barino.

17:40Thank you. Thank you to Julian and Alvin for hosting. And we have a bit more. Alvin asked Julian if he'd share some of his poetry after we rapped, and we were lucky enough to capture this.

17:59I can just share one lyrics of the show. L 'ail en nuit trivée, même vieilli dérivage carrossacé, personne ne peut effacer. L 'ail en nuit trivée, même vieilli dérivage carrossacé, personne ne peut effacer.

18:28Caravelle, caravage, mouillage large Cannibale, derrière feuillage Sur la plage, sabotage The part of a créole say When the night arrives The same idea continues to move Like the movement of the wave

18:57What a wonderful behind-the-scenes exclusive. Thank you again to Julien for being so generous with his time and his words. Julien talked about rewriting our histories, but what about our futures? We asked some influential visitors to the Biennale, if an AI could continue the work of a dead artist, who would you choose and why? My choices would probably be Helen Flankenthaler and Hieronymus Bosch. Let's see what our guests have to say. If I have to choose an artist whose work would continue with AI, I would choose Felix Gonzalez-Torres, because I think his interest in time and in light fits very well what we can see in Venice and experience again and again.

19:37It would be an artist I would be intrigued by and that probably died early. There's an artist like Ana Mandieta, Cuban artist that did a lot of works related to performance with the body and the feminine body. So it was an avant-garde kind of feminist artist. Oh, that's a good question. I mean, first of all, do I want that to happen? But anyway, I don't have a choice. I suppose it would be really interesting to choose an artist whose career was cut short and then you could kind of take your pick, you could think about Basquiat or even Raphael or Francesca Woodman if you could have AI doing something interesting with photography.

20:20So, you know, artists that had far too short a career, I would love to see what they would have done as their career developed. Thank you so much to all of our contributors who joined us in Venice for the 60th edition of the Biennale. Thank you for listening to Chanel Connects, the Venice Biennale edition. Now the number five is very important in the house of Chanel, so please consider giving us five stars on whatever platform you're listening to us. Please follow the show so you don't miss an episode. To hear more from remarkable artists, listen back to the Chanel Connects archive, where you'll find conversations between Jennifer Packer, Hans-Elrich Obrist, and Arthur Jafa, who won the Venice Golden Lion in 2019.

21:06They talk about what makes an artwork successful and the social, political, and historical ways their work can be viewed. Next time on Chanel Connects, we hear from two old friends and veterans of the Biennale, renowned South African artist William Kentridge and freethinking curator Carolyn Christophe Bakar-Giv. Together, they explore the terror of unveiling a new work why the art world is in for big changes and the complex and occasionally tense relationship between an artist and a curator. Oh, I say, here's a perfect piece for you and you say, yes, it's perfect, but it's wrong. Do I do that?

21:42Yes, you do. You do, you do, you do. Next week, find out why a bit of conflict can actually be a good thing.

22:00Thank you.