Camille Henrot (born 1978, France) is recognized as one of the most influential voices in contemporary art today. Over the past twenty years, she has developed a critically acclaimed practice, encompassing drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and film. Inspired by literature, second-hand marketplaces, poetry, cartoons, social media, self help and the banality of everyday life, Henrot’s work captures the complexity of living as both private individuals and global citizens in an increasingly connected and over-stimulated world.

HOW IS YOUR WORK INFLUENCED BY THE CIRCA 2024 MANIFESTO?
I’ve always been drawn to a counterfactual approach; towards considering how things could be rather than accepting them as they are. The standard practices of institutions – organizing, categorizing, mapping, labeling, collecting – have both fascinated and repelled me over time. I’m interested in ways that humans have developed structures and systems, but I have also always valued the potential for disruption: the pebble in the shoe, the stick in the wheel, the nuances that stop us in our tracks. I believe that while we search for order and reason, we can also flirt with a certain lack of control, and accept the natural drive towards chaos.

This dynamic push/pull between order and disorder is the throughline of much of work to date. My film Grosse Fatigue (2013), filmed in part at the Smithsonian Institution collections, was a critique of the universalist ambition to represent the totality of the world, a guiding principle that underpins many museum collections, the Internet and consumer culture as a whole. My exhibition Days Are Dogs at Palais de Tokyo in 2017, was a grappling with the manmade cycle of the days of the week. With my installation of ikebana flower arrangements Is It Possible to Be a Revolutionary and Like Flowers? (2011-2019), I considered the natural cycle of the seasons. With my installation The Pale Fox (2014), I looked to interpret the evolutionary story of human civilization and the biological life cycle. In my most recent and long lasting body of work, System of Attachment (2018-2023) and Wet Job (2018-2021), I’ve questioned the dynamics of dependency in caregiving and the societal expectations of the ‘good mother’.

The idea of ‘breaking the cycle’ for me, brings to mind the climate crisis, first and foremost. The cycle we are currently living in – which is driving us towards mass extinction – is the one that needs breaking with utmost urgency. The project I’m proposing is a mediation on our current, most pressing dilemma through the medium of film.

WHAT WOULD YOU CREATE/DO WITH THE £30K CIRCA PRIZE?
The CIRCA PRIZE would facilitate the completion of my new film, tentatively titled IN THE VEINS. The video I am submitting is a shortened teaser version of the final project, for which I still plan to shoot additional footage.

IN THE VEINS is about raising children during the climate crisis, and will seek to shape our rational, mediated understanding of the crisis into everyday symbols that resonate on the level of the unconscious.

My film takes Mierle Lederman Ukeles’ feminist artwork “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” as inspiration for a reorientation of our current ecological dilemma towards an infusion of glory and splendor in everyday domestic tasks and acts of care, repair, and rehabilitation. One of the biggest obstacles to fighting the climate crisis, and more specifically the mass extinction of wildlife, is the reluctance for human beings to fight for something that already exists, to repair something damaged rather than buying it new. In a capitalist consumerist society, especially in the West, the appeal of the ‘new’ reigns supreme. As humans, we are often only able to engage meaningfully with the things we can grasp and touch with our own hands. In my film, the symbolism and representations of wildlife in our everyday lives will serve as the leitmotif of our species’ disconnection from the natural world. Though we are all seduced by the animal world, we have been unable to mobilize the necessary resources and strategies to protect and preserve these creatures. How can we create the conditions for trans species empathy without the narcissistic reward of possession, touch, being loved and having something in return? The preservation of wildlife depends largely on our distance from it. This dilemma is similar to that of the mother, or caregiver, whose duty is to put the child’s needs at the forefront and ensure that they can walk on their own two feet. A certain amount of detachment is necessary for them to thrive. These are the everyday parallels and dichotomies that I would like to represent, in order to encourage a reflection on the personal and global psychological conflict that we are grappling with.

We are faced with the paradoxes of needing to act swiftly and efficiently while also dismantling the logic of myopic efficiency that brought us to this point, of needing to be like children again in order to become adults, and of adapting to loss, processing grief, while doing our very best to forge an ethical, sustainable way forward. IN THE VEINS will attempt to respond to these problems with the appropriate complexity and accessibility, and in such a way as to anchor the weaving path through them in the psyche more than in reason; in the heart more than in fear.

The CIRCA PRIZE will directly fund the final stage of filming for this project. I plan to travel to Japan to film the habits and daily domestic rituals of a family and community committed to a zero waste lifestyle, as well as gather footage of egg and sperm freezing at a fertility clinic. With this funding, I would be honored to participate in the presentation of alternative realities among other participants of the Circa Manifesto for 2024.

FOLLOW CAMILLE HENROT ON INSTAGRAM