Julien Creuzet, a question of resistance

When Julien Creuzet won the BMW Art Journey 2021 award, he had to think carefully about it. The idea of setting off for some exotic location he had no connection with was something of an anathema for the French-born, Martinique-raised artist, video maker, and poet. Creuzet is well versed in the political theory of Aimé Césaire, who fought for the island’s independence in the 1940s; he has read Édouard Glissant, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon Damas, and is interested in negritude, a mode of Black consciousness that can offer social and cultural resistance to colonial and neocolonial exploitation. For the artist, the process of arriving somewhere new to produce something was simply too reminiscent of the French colonists who landed in the Caribbean in the 17th century, with all the history of slavery and exploitation that catalyzed.

‘I asked myself, “What is a journey? What does travel mean?”’ the artist explains from Paris. ‘For me it is problematic to go somewhere in the world that I’ve never been to before, or that I don’t have any knowledge about, and take pictures and notes. This is just replicating the old process of colonization – and my art is all about not reproducing this old system.’

Instead, he proposed a journey around his homeland, using the opportunity to, he says, ‘connect more to where I grew up, where my mum and my family live, with the island, the communities, with the people.’ Yet even that posed ethical pitfalls. For many artists Martinique’s rugged landscape of verdant cliffs and mountains, golden beaches and blue sea, would provide ample aesthetic inspiration. Yet Creuzet is wary of exoticizing the landscape. ‘I don’t want to present Martinique like that because the social situation is very difficult. For me Martinique is not a beautiful island, but a very sad island.’ In metropolitan France 14.1% of the population lives below the poverty line, in Martinique it is 38%. With 400,000 inhabitants, it has an unemployment rate of 18% (versus 8.6% for France as a whole). ‘When the tourists arrive in Martinique, they go to the beach every day. I can tell you that my dad will have visited the beach just once or twice this year. People from Martinique do not have the time and energy to go to the beach.’ Instead, in July, he went on long walks, noting down the names and taking pictures of the island’s flora; he visited the Absalon waterfall, following in the footsteps of a walk said to have been taken by Wifredo Lam, André Breton and other intellectuals who had escaped France to the island in 1941. He visited his grandmother. Creuzet says he also took a lot of photographs of cars. It was, he says, the first time he saw the island through the eyes of an artist.

With further trips to Martinique curtailed by pandemic travel restrictions, plans for a series of typically hybrid sculptures that mix local flora with found industrial objects, as well as various multimedia elements, are on hold. However Creuzet says that his priority is not what inspiration the island might provide his work, but what he might be able to bring to the island. Another idea has been to put the resources he now has access to thanks to the BMW prize toward establishing a space in Fort-de-France, the island’s capital, where local art students, as well as musicians and filmmakers, will be able to establish themselves without having to leave Martinique or depend on the institutions of mainland France. ‘My work doesn’t only focus on Martinique and its politics. My question is more of alterity. You have an origin, you are from somewhere, and you have an imagination, and from this imagination you can have both dreams and nightmares.’

Winning the prize is the latest in what has been an impressive run of accolades for the artist. He graduated from art school in the Normandy port of Caen in 2011, going on to gain two postgraduate diplomas. In 2019 he had a solo show at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and in 2020 his work was included in Manifesta 13, Marseilles. He was nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp this year, with his work on show at the Pompidou, and next year he will have an exhibition at Camden Art Centre in London. Audiences have been impressed by the restless range of his production, which incorporates sculptural arrangements often interrupted by slick digital video and sound works. Creuzet’s lengthy titles take the form of poems, a hangover of his early ambition to be a rapper. The title of the Palais de Tokyo exhibition was typical of this: ‘dim lights of distant stars LEDs of warning lights indulge, lamp post embers that burn wings, mad sacrifice of the light butterfly, twilight phantom from before the birth of the world (...) it’s the uncanny, I must have been gone too long that place far away, home is in my black-dreams it’s the uncanny, strangled words while drowning, I howled alone underwater, my fever (...)’. At the gallery, the visitor experienced an array of tempos within just a few meters of stepping into the industrial building. Central to one installation was a large number of interlocking metal bars, from which the artist hung various textiles, trailing cables, and household objects. Perspex sheets on which the artist had made semi-abstract line drawings were attached; paintings lay on the floor. Other works featured TV monitors showing digitally manipulated or animated footage, images of smoking, or of text conversations; electronic music often spilled through the galleries and domestic electric fans hung amid this bombardment on the senses.

‘I work like that out of necessity,’ he explains. ‘If I produce a drawing, I can get frustrated about why it’s just two-dimensional. When I make a sculpture, I will ask myself, “But what does this sculpture sound like?” The different mediums mean I don’t have to offer an explanation of my work. Poetry can provide information for the sculpture, a sound work can offer atmosphere. As I started showing I became less interested in having sculpture installed one by one, or painting one by one, [and more in] making an exhibition a live experience, an ecosystem into which you walk.’ The busy atmosphere reflects the energy of his studio. ‘I’m doing everything at the same time – I will be writing a text on my phone, I’ll be making a sculpture, I can be making music. If I think of everything I do in the same week, it’s the same mind, it’s the same person, and therefore it’s a story – a story that can be placed within the same installation. I don’t want to make distinctions between all those actions, it’s just about being alive.’

Launched in 2015, the BMW Art Journey is a collaboration between Art Basel and BMW, offering artists an opportunity to undertake a journey of creative discovery. Find out more about the artists’ work and the initiative here and follow BMW Group Culture on Instagram and Facebook for regular updates.