Grosse Fatgue © Camille Henrot – Courtesy the artist, Silex Films and Kamel Mennour, Paris
Grosse Fatigue is a 13-minute color film that includes videos of screens, bodies, computer desktop, and computer windows.
Henrot created Grosse Fatigue during her 2013 fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.
The video makes use of themes such as insanity, madness, euphoria, and information overload.
The work was presented during the Venice Biennial, through the invitation of curator Massimiliano Gioni.
With Grosse Fatigue, Henrot set herself the challenge of telling the story of the universe’s creation.
The text that provides the audio component of the work was written in collaboration with Jacob Bromberg, performed by artist Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh, and accompanied with music composed by Joakim.
In the beginning there was no earth, no water – nothing. There was a single hill called Nunne Chaha.
In the beginning everything was dead.
In the beginning there was nothing; nothing at all. No light, no life, no movement no breath.
In the beginning there was an immense unit of energy.
In the beginning there was nothing but shadow and only darkness and water and the great god Bumba.
In the beginning were quantum fluctuations.
Excerpt from Grosse Fatigue.
Camille Henrot is a French artist who lives and works in New York. Combining the roles of artist and anthropologist, Henrot’s art revolves around an intensive research process, the results being used to construct multimedia narratives that explore the history of the universe, the nature of myth, and the limits of human knowledge.
Henrot’s practice draws together a range of natural and cultural materials through the combination of video, sculpture, painting, installation, drawing, and ikebana flower arrangements, and the resulting marriage of these objects and images demonstrate how systems of classification and representation can shape the ways in which we see and understand the world.
Sources:
Griffin, Johnathan, Harper, Paul, Trigg, David, Williams, Eliza. The Twenty First Century Art Book. Phaidon Press Limited, 2014
Tylevich, Katya, Eastham, Ben. My Life as a Work of Art. Laurence King Publishing, 2016
a journey that wasn't 