Julien Creuzet

The Bell, Providence, USA

- Rebecca Rose Cuomo

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;