Julien Creuzet (b. 1986, Le Blanc Mesnil, France, lives Paris) has reimagined his French Pavillion from the 60th Venice Biennale for The Bell. An immersive video and archipelagic sculptural installation, 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 (2024) extends Creuzet’s focus on water as a site of both historical and contemporary traumas and emancipatory futures. A liquid ecosystem of voice, texture, sound, and moving image as divine presence, this multisensorial project is deeply sonic and draws from hip-hop, jazz, and other musical forms and bodily gestures across the African diaspora. Creuzet’s artistic practice has long referenced legacies of colonialism, and his challenge to the architecture and history of the French Pavilion extends to Brown University's campus and Providence’s centrality within the Black Atlantic.

Brown is situated near the Providence River, one of the many Rhode Island ports through which the largest number of enslaved Africans entered the Thirteen Colonies prior to 1774. Triangulated with Africa and the Caribbean in the 18th century, the shipping industry of Rhode Island evolved to be deeply enmeshed with the U.S. cotton industry as the region became a center of textile production in the 19th century. Creuzet is fascinated by the watery connection between Venice, the Caribbean island of Martinique where his family has lived for generations, and Providence, conceptualizing the migration of the pavilion across a Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean dense with histories that have long informed his work. The presentation at Brown is of a different viscosity, an adaptation to Providence waterways and colonial thematics that are present on campus and loom large across the region. 

At Brown, Creuzet expands his sculptural practice while introducing new forms of environmental affect. Six massive steel floor sculptures commissioned for The Bell are installed across the List Lobby and into the gallery, mercurial amalgams of tropical foliage and animals silhouetted and superimposed onto islands of layered meaning and metaphor. Shimmering under the light of four massive projection screens, these metal objects create an aquatic visual presence that forces contact with a ground material separate from the tile and painted cement floors of the galleries. To enter into the List Art Building and The Bell, one must walk across and through these sculptures, which shift slightly based on angle and approach. The installation insists on a tactile relationship with viewers, one that is echoed in the music that emanates from The Bell and List Lobby and flows into the interstitial social spaces of the building. 

The translinguistic soundscape of Attila cataract (...) is a dirge to those who have experienced death in the Black Atlantic, both forced upon by others and through forms of self-emancipation. These six songs feature lyrics written by Creuzet—predominantly in creolized French with real-time translation in Portuguese, English, and Spanish available on a large flatscreen—reflecting the migratory and cultural entanglement of the Caribbean in defiance of colonial borders and nation-states. Sonically overflowing at and beyond the liminal space of the gallery, they were composed to accompany the four-channel video installation to form the core conceptual elements of the project as it travels beyond Venice. Video animations feature sea creatures both real and mythic, from turtles and fish to languid oceanic deities: a sinking Neptune statue from the staircase of the Doge’s Palace in Venice; three cherubs dancing around the Art Nouveau streetlight from Pont Alexandre III bridge in Paris; and mermaid figures that reflect African cosmologies away from the hyper-sexualized fantasies of European sailors. The gestures these various figures perform are drawn from Creuzet’s Afro-diasporic archive of dance and rituals, a global gathering of movement that has recently propelled his practice into the choreographic. 

Opening Attila cataract (...) on February 20th is the performance Algorithm ocean true blood moves (2023), a collaboration between Creuzet and Brazilian choreographer Ana Pi. Co-commissioned by Performa and the Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam and mounted on the main stage of Brown’s new Lindemann Performing Arts Center, Algorithm ocean true blood moves features vocalist Malou Beauvoir, bélé drummer Boris Percus, and the Martinican dancehall genre Shatta composed by musician Natoxie. Movement is choreographed by Ana Pi and performed by dancers from The Ailey School, who navigate a multiplicity of the African diaspora's gestures and landscapes that Creuzet and Pi have gathered from the internet and social media. During Algorithm ocean true blood moves the dancers engage with long pole sculptures that are knotted and fringed with the fibrous vocabulary of Creuzet’s sculptural practice. Structuring shapes are wrapped in multiple layers of string, rope, and twine that incorporate found objects into their design and leave tendrils to drape towards the ground, often directly engaging with his metal floor pieces. 

Following the performance of Algorithm ocean true blood moves, the poles will be installed within The Bell for the remainder of the exhibition, a material afterlife rich with the potential kinetic energy that informs so much of Creuzet’s static objects. Joined by two additional vertically aligned sculptures, they collectively appear uprooted in the gallery, mounted in air and capable of growth in any direction. In longtime connection with Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, Creuzet’s practice embodies the “relational poetics” that Glissant theorized as rhizomatic, defining French-Caribbean identity as both evolving and contextualized by the complex global histories that shaped French and European modernity projects worldwide, including slavery in the United States. As the project coheres on this side of the Atlantic, Attila cataract (...) unfolds in a resonance of loss and resistance, an act of reparation/emancipation/reclaiming and celebration of Afro-diasporic systems of knowledge, beliefs, and philosophies.  

– Kate Kraczon, Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions, The Bell / Brown Arts Institute

In development since 2020, 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 began as an exhibition co-commissioned by The Bell and Le Magasin - Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble and its director, Céline Kopp. The 2023 announcement that Creuzet would represent France in the 60th Venice Biennale evolved the project: Kopp and curator Cindy Sissokho organized a prelude survey of Crezuet’s work in fall of 2023 at Le Magasin titled Oh téléphone, oracle noir (...), followed by Kopp and Sissokho’s curation of the Venice Pavilion in 2024. The Bell is the first site of the U.S. presentation of Attila cataract (...), which will tour to Institute for Contemporary Art, Virginia Commonwealth University and The Gund at Kenyon College.

Extensive scholarship on Brown’s campus engages with the theorists, activists, and artists, such as Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and Aimé Césaire, who propel Creuzet’s thinking. The Bell will develop a publication in both French and English, which will emerge from a public symposium on Creuzet’s practice in relation to the Caribbean diaspora that will be held at Brown on April 10 and 11, 2025. 

Julien Creuzet (b. 1986, Le Blanc Mesnil, France, lives Paris) represented France at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) and has had solo exhibitions at Le Magasin Centre National D’Art Contemporain, Grenoble France (2023); Performa Biennial, New York (2023); LUMA, Zürich, Switzerland (2023); LUMA, Arles, France (2022); the Camden Art Centre, London, UK (2022); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2021); Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France (2019); CAN Centre d’Art Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland (2019); Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris, France (2018); and Bétonsalon, Paris, France (2018). He is included in the collections of the Kadist Art Foundation, Centre Pompidou, Fondation Villa Datris, Fondation d ’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Carré d’Art-Musée d’art contemporain, Frac Normandie Rouen, Frac Normandie Caen, Frac Grand Large - Hauts-de-France, Frac des Pays de la Loire, Frac Île-de France, Frac Aquitaine, and FRAC. Recently, Creuzet participated in the 35ª Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo (2023); 12th Liverpool Biennial (2023); Momenta Biennale de L’image (2021); Frestas Triennial Sao Paolo (2021); Manifesta 13 (2020); the 12th Gwangju Biennale (2018); the 6th Rennes Biennale (2018); FIAC (2018); the 11th Biennale Africaine de la Photographie (2017); the 14th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art (2017); and the Festival Hors Piste at the Centre Pompidou (2017). Creuzet is the recipient of the 2021 BMW Art Journey Award and the 2019 Camden Arts Centre Emerging Artist Prize at Frieze.

Céline Kopp was appointed director of Le Magasin, the National Center for Contemporary Art in Grenoble in 2022. She was director of Triangle-Astérides, a 30-year-old non-profit visual arts organization based in Marseille, from 2012-2022, where she developed exhibition projects with Liz Magor, the Chicano artist group Asco, Paul Maheke, Jesse Darling, and Lydia Ourahmane, among others. She was Curator of the 6th Ateliers de Rennes Contemporary Art Biennial, the Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow at MCA Chicago, and has conceived numerous projects in France and abroad, notably with the Powerhouse in Memphis and SixtyEight Art Institute in Copenhagen. Since 2020, she has been elected to the board of d.c.a, the national network for the development of art centers in France, where she promotes her vision of the art institution as a site for the assertion of cultural rights: artist-centered, audience-responsive, and site-specific.

Cindy Sissokho is a curator, cultural producer, art consultant, and writer with a specific focus on anti-colonial, social, and political practices within the arts and culture. Her writing and curatorial work is nurtured by the urgency to broaden and disseminate knowledge and artistic production from systemically racialized and marginalized perspectives. She is the curator of the major exhibition Hard Graft: Work, Health & Rights (2024–ongoing), at the Wellcome Collection, London. Sissokho previously worked as a curator at the New Art Exchange and in Exhibitions and Public Programmes at Nottingham Contemporary.

The exhibition team at the Brown Arts Institute includes Ian Budish, Exhibitions Installation Manager; Kate Hao, Curatorial Coordinator; Preparators Naushon Hale, Eddie Villanueva, and Brenden Peirce; Thea Quiray Tagle, Associate Curator; and Nicole Wholean, University Curator and Registrar.

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 was originated for the French Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale by curators Céline Kopp and Cindy Sissokho. The project ⁠is made possible at Brown by generous support from Steve Brown ‘05 and Kate Quinlin, Teiger Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Etant donnés, a program of Villa Albertine, and Institut français on behalf of the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and the Ministry for Culture. 

The project was produced by Institut français, operator of the French Pavilion at the International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia on behalf of the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Culture, with the exceptional support of the CHANEL Culture Fund and the support of the LUMA Foundation. Technical partner, iDzia; in partnership with La Collectivité Territoriale de Martinique, Le Millénaire de Caen, and La Fondation des Artistes.