Julien Creuzet On Water as a Repository of Collective Memory and Place of Reconnection

Originally from Martinique, Julien Creuzet brought his distinctive French-Caribbean voice to the French Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale where he reflects on the sea as both a horizon of opportunity and a threat, a place of healing and life as well as death and suffering. In Venice, Creuzet envisioned a pavilion where ‘overseas territories’ and the ‘ultramarine’ merge into a fluid dimension, evoking our embryonic origins in water and humanity’s dependence on this vital element. His work, titled Attila cataracte ta source aux pieds des pitons verts finira dans la grande mer gouffre bleu nous nous noyâmes dans les larmes marées de la lune (or “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”) reads like a poem that connects ancient mythologies and suggests a continuous flow of narratives and spiritualities born from intercultural exchange.

“We need to consider which is the first and oldest memory a child has, as an embryo, before birth,” Creuzet told Observer. “This is an immersive experience inside the liquid—the liquid of maternity and life. Sometimes, when we take a bath and go to the beach, more or less unconsciously, we can feel again and retrieve memories about that, especially when our body is floating inside the water.”

Building on this concept, Creuzet has created an immersive multimedia and multisensory installation that blends sound, video and sculpture to explore the myths of hybrid societies. Sculptural threads hang from the ceiling, rich in texture and pigment, unraveling across the space like an intricate forest of lianas or a coral cluster. These threads capture relics of human civilization entangled in the currents of nature and history. In crafting this sensory confluence of narratives and sensations, Creuzet has forged a radical imaginary that invites connection to the divine, ancestral and, simultaneously, to Venice, with its canals and maritime legacy.

In Creuzet’s work, water—particularly as it manifests in seas and oceans—serves as a vehicle for the continuous flow of history, the movement of people, energies and ideas shaping new forms. The mysterious narrative he weaves within the space embraces water as a repository of collective memories and traumas but also as a realm of initiation, healing and regeneration. As Creuzet recalls, although he was born and raised in the suburbs of Paris, his family took him back to Martinique before he was even a month old to have his first saltwater bath—a ritual of reconnection and the continuation of family heritage.

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His evolving mythopoiesis through video, poetry and sculpture unfolds across media with a boundless flow, where imagination allows him to tap into and reactivate timeless archetypes and symbols in a cross-cultural dimension. This hybridization of traditions results in the creation of new mythological beings. As Creuzet explains, the deities and demons of the sea that fluctuate around the pavilion were conceived through extensive research by him and his studio into various mythological and religious traditions tied to the sea. “We did a lot of research on how different civilizations conceived representations and mythologies about water. It’s a mythology we find everywhere, with different names, as an innate necessity across geographies.”

Digital animation and new technologies serve as powerful tools in Creuzet’s hands, bringing his envisioned creatures to life as universal hybrids that embody various symbologies and traditions. These traditions have long sought to represent the mysterious forces and energies of the sea. As Creuzet noted during our conversation, monotheistic and polytheistic religions, particularly animism, once attempted to depict these forces as deities or demons. Today, in a society that has largely lost faith in religion, it seems artists are among the few who can still create magical representations. This ability is crucial for helping us visualize the unknown forces of nature and, more importantly, for imagining different futures. Artists hold a unique connection to the ancestral, with the ability to extend the past’s reality into the future.

Building on this idea, Creuzet has reimagined the statue of Neptune atop the staircases at Palazzo della Dogana in Venice. He explained that Neptune has symbolically entered the pavilion, embodying his classical role as the god of the sea and his cosmic connections. Other sculptural elements in the pavilion evoke ancient relics and remnants of a civilization lost to the sea. Yet everything in the pavilion exists in a suspended, liquid, embryonic space where past, present and future converge. The artist’s imagination, manifesting in this multisensory experience, invites visitors to immerse themselves and float between these dimensions.

The artist reflected here that his Caribbean identity allows him to navigate and operate more consciously within these fluid, hybrid dimensions. Édouard Glissant’s concept of “Creolization” illustrates this well—the Caribbean’s history, with its composite population, exemplifies the fertile melting pot of cultures, deities and traditions that arose from centuries of movement, colonization, migration and trade.

“I think to be a Caribbean person is about this universalism,” said Creuzet. “Simply because the Caribbean is a considerable mixing of different civilizations.” Yet at the same time, this hybrid reality seems to be the only viable position for those in exile or distanced from a singular national perspective. Like Ovid writing Metamorphoses while in exile, Creuzet added, this detachment from dominant narratives opens the door to explore broader universal themes.

“Contemporary art is a question of metamorphosis, a potential metamorphosis of society’s vision,” he said, revealing his approach to art and this project. For him, art is an exercise in radical imagination. By drawing on the accumulated heritage of knowledge and symbologies from various cultures and historical moments, it can still shape a new, meaningful universe in a universal language, casting light on a more harmonious future.

Celebrating the boundless imaginative potential of art and poetry, the Biennale pavilion Creuzet conceived embraces a pioneering universalism—one already embedded in the Caribbean—that can inspire a rich and beneficial coexistence among diverse individuals and entities.

Julien Creuzet’s “Attila cataracte ta source aux pieds des pitons verts finira dans la grande mer gouffre bleu nous nous noyâmes dans les larmes marées de la lune” is on view through November 24.