From Diamant, a town in the south of Martinique, to the Venetian Giardini, there is only one step, the sea and a few thousand kilometers. While France is represented for the first time by a Franco-Caribbean artist at the Venice Biennale, it is also the first time that an artist has decentralized announcements about his project outside of France. There had indeed been the previous Zineb Sedira, in 2022, who had chosen to organize the ritual press conference not in Paris, but in the cinema of his childhood, in Gennevilliers (Hauts-de-Seine). The world of cinema was at the heart of his proposal, as Martinique is at the heart of that of Julien Creuzet who, as soon as he was born in Blanc-Mesnil (Seine-Saint-Denis), thirty-seven years ago, had made the travel so far.
“Do you hear the sea?” », chants the artist in front of his visitors, a small delegation arriving from all over the world, on February 5, with representatives of the French Institute, operator of the pavilion, welcoming them seated in the grass on the striking site of Cap 110, memorial dedicated to slavery overlooking the Caribbean Sea, and facing the singular rock, emerging from the water, which gives its name to the town of Diamant. Leather visor-cap screwed onto the head, from which escapes a mass of dreadlocks styled in an arabesque, and cutlass in hand, an object which was both a tool in the cane fields and a weapon, and which mutates in symbolic sculpture in his hands.
Visual artist and poet
The sound of the surf accompanies the reading on the microphone of a poem, of a montage of texts by the young Reunion writer Estelle Coppolani, and the broadcast of a piece “posthumous and chimerical” on the trumpet of Jacques Coursil (1938-2020) by Grégory Privat. A moment of grace joined by a few intrigued walkers.
Creuzet is a visual artist and a poet, one does not exist without the other. And it is from the house and garden of a poet, the illustrious thinker of the “All-world”, Edouard Glissant (1928-2011), that the artist chose to organize his press conference, broadcast in directly on the French Institute website. It is quite simply there that the artist is in residence in the company of his two curators, Céline Kopp, director of the Magasin, in Grenoble, and Cindy Sissokho, curator at the Wellcome Collection in London, the trio having officially inaugurated the Edouard Sliding Art Fund. Previously private, the house will now be open to artists and researchers in residence, with the longer-term project of creating an adjacent art center.
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