Editor’s Note: For further context, read our article HERE.
Julien Creuzet with Ana Pi: Your Source at the Feet of the Green Peaks
Friday, October 10 from 5 to 7 PM
Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU
Free admission with RSVP HERE
When French-Caribbean artist Julien Creuzet speaks, his words move like tides circling, swelling, pulling you in. “It started maybe two years ago,” he told us, “with an idea to make a French representation in Venice. But what does it mean to represent a nation when you are from the French Caribbean? If I go to Venice, I want to begin on the opposite island in Martinique. Because that is the earth. That is the source.”
That word, source, anchors his exhibition now at the ICA, 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. It’s a dreamlike environment of sculpture, video, and sound that collapses the distance between the Caribbean and Virginia, between myth and debris, between what’s lost and what remains. “A source for drinking water, a source of imagination, a source of emotion,” Creuzet said. “It’s about what we need to live, to feel, to imagine.”
In those gallery spaces, classical monuments drift upside-down through digital seas. Figures of Western art history are submerged and made buoyant again “heavy monuments plunged into the ocean,” as we previously described, “where they float, inverted … full of wonder and open-endedness.” Creuzet lets their meanings dissolve and recombine, like coral growing on old marble.
Friday’s one-night performance with Brazilian choreographer Ana Pi, Your Source at the Feet of the Green Peaks, brings that same sense of drifting into real space and time. “What does water mean? What does salt water mean? What does sweet water mean?” he asked. “It can begin a huge conversation with many ramifications.”
Sound has always been central to Creuzet’s work. In the ICA installation, a two-hour soundscape of his voice, singing poetry in Creole, French, and English, loops through the space like a tide, merging with Pi’s choreography in what curator Amber Esseiva once called “the pulse of the show.” Onstage, that pulse will quicken; the music and movement will move together, a kind of living current.
Creuzet talks about beauty the way others might talk about faith. “A friend found a seashell at the beach,” he said, “and I told her it was plastic. But it was still beautiful. The sand, the water, the ocean, they had transformed it. It’s not a seashell, but it became one. That’s what I love, how something can be beautiful and terrible at once. How transformation itself creates meaning.”
For Richmond, that tension between trauma and beauty, between what history takes and what imagination returns, feels close to home. Creuzet acknowledges the weight of place without turning it into a slogan. “It’s important for everybody to question history,” he said. “Your own history, your collective history. Sometimes it’s traumatic. Sometimes it’s beautiful. But we can’t just put history in a box and forget the box. We have to open it again through poetry, through beauty.”
Friday night’s performance will likely feel the same way the exhibition does, part ritual, part dream. Creuzet and Pi build worlds where sound, movement, and image blur together until language is almost irrelevant. “I don’t make work to fight,” he said. “I make work to share, a live experience, a moment with the public. And maybe that moment can start to activate something in you.”
He smiled as we finished talking, his voice gentle but insistent: “It’s about sharing. About beauty, about emotion, about dreaming. About finding the source again.”
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