Julien Creuzet Charts a Liquid Futurism

Rooted in and routed through the Black Atlantic, Julien Creuzet’s exuberant exhibition at Brown University’s The Bell powerfully charts Afro-diasporic presence. Titled ‘Attila cataract your source at the feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon’, the show builds on the artist’s eponymous French pavilion presentation at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Encompassing sculpture, video, poetry, performance and sound, the installation embodies what Édouard Glissant described in Poetics of Relation (1990) as échos-monde: resonances awakening our positionality across rhizomatic connections.

Attila cataract (…) (2024) invites us into an aqueous world teeming with life and activity. Four videos projected on both sides of large, ceiling-hung panels appear to float. Whereas Creuzet’s video installation at the French pavilion was screened on single-sided, wall-mounted LED monitors, his exhibition at The Bell is a pluri-perspective submergence. Colourful sea creatures, real and imaginary, glide through a kelp forest; a sea turtle slowly swims through a fishing net; Ronde des Amours (1900), Henri Désiré Gauquié’s cupid-adorned streetlight on Paris’s Pont Alexandre III, bobs under the water’s surface. Across these three video channels, industrial detritus and organic materials – plastic bags, bottles, plants, feathers – litter the water. In the fourth video, Jacopo Sansovino’s Neptune (c.1554–67) from Venice’s Palazzo Ducale – a statue conceived to represent Venetian dominion over the sea – is inverted, sinking. Neptune may command the Mediterranean, but we’re in the Atlantic now: these waters belong to different gods.

The show’s soundscape comprises six percussive songs with poetic lyrics written by Creuzet in French creole; synchronized English, Spanish and Portuguese translations are screened on the gallery’s back wall. Creuzet was born in the suburbs of Paris and raised in Martinique. His convergence of language reflects histories of migration, colonization, deterritorialization and reinvention continuously unfolding in the Caribbean. ‘Let us leave the earth / Onwards to the sea,’ Creuzet’s lyrics read. ‘This water / is liberation.’

‘Palmistry of the Desiring Waters’ (2024) is a new series of Corten steel floor sculptures laser-cut with animal migration patterns, botanical elements, geological phenomena and molecular diagrams. Two of the sculptures feature silhouettes of dancers performing choreographer, anthropologist and activist Katherine Dunham’s L’Ag’Ya (1938), a ballet based on a combat-dance she witnessed while conducting ethnographic research in Martinique. Martinican ladja originated in African martial arts and was subversively mobilized by enslaved people not only to prepare for uprisings, but also to uphold ancestral traditions and philosophies. As researcher T.J. Desch-Obi observed in Fighting for Honor (2008), such techniques ‘emanated out of […] an entire cosmological system that understood bodies of water to be bridges connecting the lands of the living and the realm of the dead’. Creuzet’s allusions to ladja fluidly trace such transnational currents of embodied wisdom.

On the opening night, Creuzet staged Algorithm ocean true blood moves (2023), a performance developed in collaboration with choreographer Ana Pi, at Lindemann Performing Arts Center. Creuzet and Pi compiled a movement archive based on content culled from the internet: dances connecting Black communities across time and space. In the vibrant performance that resulted, bodies came together and moved apart, ebbing and flowing like ocean tides. About halfway through, dancers activated three sculptural poles, grande canne qui caresse le ciel et la terre 1, 2 and 3 (Large Cane that Caresses the Sky and the Earth, all 2023), lusciously covered with fibres and threads hanging like Spanish moss. After the performance, these sculptures were installed at The Bell – motionless except when the strings catch a breeze. Through his complex, ambitious practice, Creuzet constellates images, sounds, gestures and environments caught in ceaseless flux and transformation.

Julien Creuzet, ‘Attila cataract your source at the feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon’, is on view at The Bell, Providence until 1 June

^{Main image: Julien Creuzet, ‘Attila cataract your source at the feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon’, 2025. Courtesy: the artist and David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University; photograph Julia Featheringill Photography}