Julien Creuzet
Great Moment of Transport, Body to Body, Boat on my Dunes, Boat on your back, Hands on our waves

With this opening line, Julien Creuzet invites us along for a meandering narrative in which phrases and sounds echo in the form of songs, poetry, performance, video and sculpture. In the exhibition space, a sensuous stream of words and images comes alive that is rooted in the artist’s native island of Martinique.

Creuzet’s works refer to Martinique’s literary, cultural and geographic identity. Organic growth and the Caribbean ‘rhythm’ are the foundation for the work at KIOSK: the base for the structure was made in 2018 in cooperation with Les Ateliers de Rennes, but is expanded here with new extensions. The work behaves much like a complex jungle or mangrove ecosystem from Martinique. An expansive network of roots, above and underneath the ground, spreads through the rooms, is enveloped in a hypnotic chirping of crickets and entangles washed up materials – old clothes and worn-out implements. Different materials, bodies and eventually also landscapes and ideas intermingle; wave upon wave, they wash up in couples: silt and strips of plastic; bikini briefs and boat; skin and pixel; shell and screen; mouth and ear; noise and trance; nude and veil; container and condom; blood vessel and braid; saliva and text message; identity and rhizome; hydratation and decentralization; tinder and thunderstorm; you and me; French and Creole; West and East; source and echo; ebb and flood; in and out; man and woman; Lova Lova, Safari Go and Ocean flow (...).

The work has many entries and exits; it deploys assemblage and cultural appropriation to transform exoticism into something new; it introduces new, unexpected forms and a multitude of stories. Stories that hint at histories of love, colonial oppression and ecological disasters, or worlds of imagination. On this island, the clock indicates a different time, (digital) bodies seem to crumble slowly, and everything is fluid. The water functions as a powerful metaphor for the continuous commercial, cultural and intercontinental exchange of people, culture and vegetation. Creuzet visualizes the journey, the encounter with the Other, which the poet and writer Édouard Glissant described in a way that resonates with this installation: “Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.”

The exhibition stands as one great visual and acoustic collage of complementary, personal and collective memories. The different sound tracks and textures, protagonists and identities clash, seduce and distort each other. Like the mangrove’s aerial roots, they become part of a networked and breathing landscape in a continuous state of flux.

exhibition text / press release / poster