File Note 138: Julien Creuzet

‘The stone had skidded arc’d and bloomed into islands.’ As it skipped through radiant calypso-coloured water, in its wake appeared Jamaica, Guadeloupe, and Grenada, writes poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite. I picture the white spray of the waves washing onto the shores of his native Barbados before receding again, only to return – differently. The same particles will never appear in the same constellation twice, but the incessant roiling of the sea will continue to caress the beaches of Puerto Rico, St Lucia and Martinique, disregarding any human-imposed borders or divisions between land and sea. It is on the beach, where the surge moves sand, where seaweed washes up to dry, that cultures meet and at times clash. I like to follow Brathwaite’s suggestion to think the world ‘tidalectically’. With tidalectics, a play on Hegelian dialectics that are based in unshakeable static truths detectable from the stable land of the European continent, Brathwaite suggests an alternative philosophy, moving to and fro with the perpetual ebb and flow of the tides. Rather than dividing, this way of thinking and being connects. Islands are not separated, but interlinked by the sea. And, since no wave ever repeats, this oceanic worldview affords an ample way to embrace uncertainty and change. 

Reminiscent of the ocean’s particles dancing in ever new arrays, in Julien Creuzet’s work, relations are continuously evolving. His sculptures are composed of mixed media – plastic, metal, sea sponges, electrical wiring, carpet, speakers, rope, a hair dryer, snakeskin, synthetic plants, corn flour, a sea shell – some of which can be thought of as debris washed up on land from the sea. Or perhaps, more accurately, his installations are composed of all the stuff that is produced and sold as part of the phenomenon we know as globalisation, shipped across the world from factories in China or Nigeria, and spilling over the edges of urban spaces to sometimes end up dumped into the ocean. Here, it inhabits the same space as a conch shell, microplastics returning to the bottom of the sea, where they turn to oil once again over millennia, rendering any attempts at dividing nature from culture forever obsolete. 

Dividable into us and them. Otherable. Jamaican philosopher and poet Sylvia Wynter knows of the power that lies with naming: ‘Both We and Other were now bound in a concrete relation, a hierarchical global relation’, she writes. This hierarchical relation spans from continents (West to East) to states (France to Martinique), to regions (city to countryside), and extends to entrench gender, race and class  in hierarchical, fixed constellations. In Creuzet’s installations, relations are in constant evolution, indeterminant but not meaningless. They create what the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant describes as ‘the knowledge in motion of beings, which risks the being of the world’. They evade the generalisations – explanations – and truths of Western thought tied to the imperialist fantasy of universality. 

With his most recent body of work shown at Camden Art Centre, Creuzet tackles the idea of nationhood and its colonial ties, symbolisms and divisions. In his suspended sculptures he brings together coats of arms of various Caribbean countries. The outlines of the shields are inhabited by various shapes made from torn fabric, string, metal wire, pages of a book sewn in, a small bottle of liquor – or is it vanilla essence? Placed on the floor are laser-cut metal sheets that can be walked on, implicating viewers in composites merging, in one case, the Commonwealth symbol composed of the letter C coiled around a representation of the globe, the silhouette of the national flower of Barbados (Caesalpinia pulcherrima), the claws of a parrot from the coat of arms of Dominica, a diagram of a British slave ship that travelled from Bristol to Jamaica via Nigeria, and a representation of the North Atlantic Drift between the Greater and Lesser Antilles. In another sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is illustrated – a key factor in stabilising the climate across the planet. In a paper published last year, German climate scientist Niklas Boers suggests that the AMOC is weakening and could reach a tipping point this century, whichwill cause the weather in northern Europe to become more extreme, while sea levels will rise exponentially on the eastern coast of the Americas, and West Africa will experience severe droughts. 

Collaborations with artists and thinkers from various fields recur in Creuzet’s practice. So does music. For the exhibition at Camden Art Centre, he invited French-Senegalese musician anaiis to produce a soundtrack inspired by Caribbean writers such as Martinican poet Aimé Cesaire and composed, among others, of field recordings she took in Jamaica. Within this sonic field encompassing his installations, Creuzet explores the bélé, a creole folk dance popular in Martinique among other islands in the West Indies, combining African fertility dances, the orisha-style call and response between a vocalist and a chorus, and influences from the land and waterscapes of the Caribbean. In his new video, an animated character composed of smartphones, cigarettes, bananas and other elements, dances to the distinct rhythm of the bélé, hinting at the ways in which creolisation continues today in the digitally connected world, but also through music and literature. Bélé was commonly danced during funerals, as a vehicle of mourning during slavery, rendering it a technology of resistance. As Sylvia Wynter writes, ‘Exactly! The whole world is organized about this aesthetics of rhythm, you know?’ The works in Creuzet’s hybrid universe don’t come from the sea, but instead constitute a sea of ever-changing meanings and relations, swaying back and forth with the rhythm of the waves.