Camille Henrot

The film is a meditation on the way mass extinction is not talked about and that the climate crisis predominantly focuses on big catastrophes or the consequences for humans but doesn’t speak about the disappearance of species. Meanwhile, animals are everywhere in how we teach children to write, read, understand the world, and control their emotions. There is this discrepancy between how attached we are to images of animals and the joy we feel looking at them and how little they are being protected legislatively. I wonder whether artists have tools for people to build empathy in a new way or use it to inspire our will and transform it into action. I’m wondering how we can use the tenderness, attraction, and seductive image of animals to benefit their protection.

We live in a society for adults where children—despite what we say—don’t have the same rights. There’s no real protection—we’ve seen it in the US regarding gun laws, we’ve seen it in the ongoing wars, and we’ve seen it in domestic situations where children are being abused. I think the lack of urgency for climate action is another indicator of the absence of empathy for children, since it will affect them the most. And I believe the lack of empathy for children and the drought of compassion for animals are connected.

Parallel to the exploration of childcare and the presence of animals in childhood education, I’m interested in integrating elements connected with the farming of the future, but also this drive we have around the preservation of our organs, sperm and eggs, and the storage of blood. There’s a lot of obsession around cryogenics and the optimisation of the body that is very present in American culture. We invest so much energy and money into preserving our bodies, but what does it mean to safeguard the body for a world that will be destroyed? Where will these bodies drink water from? What will they eat?

What would sustain us in a more pragmatic way would be banning toxic products and pollutants, having more green space, and investing in education, and those things simply aren’t done. I’m trying to film actions of daily care, like feeding a child and giving them a bath, dressing a child, putting them to bed, reading a book. I want those actions to look super epic because I think, in a way, they are.

There’s a scene in In the Veins that we filmed at Toucan Rescue Ranch, a wildlife rescue and rehabilitation centre in Costa Rica, where they’re putting fish skin on a sloth’s missing arm. It’s very violent and brutal to watch, but at the same time, it’s also beautiful to think that we’re using fish skin to heal the wounds of a mammal. I remember David Attenborough saying, ‘The climate crisis is a communications challenge’. I entirely agree with this analysis. That’s why we creators, writers, and artists must think about communicating about the climate crisis and mass extinction in a way that propels people to act. In the Veins is trying to understand how to do that. One way is to highlight the fact that there is an epic amount of effort and creativity involved in caring for a child, in repairing the arm of a mama sloth who was burnt by electrical wires.

Sloths in spectacular Costa Rica confuse tree vines with electrical wires as human infrastructure encroaches on their habitat. The rainforest has hundreds of tree species and just as many boutique group developers. (The sloth wasn’t fine, if you cared.)

I completely agree with that. There’s something super interesting about rats because they look so modern and contemporary, but they’re one of the first mammals on earth. They also say that in the event of a catastrophe on a global scale, the rat is the animal most likely to survive, as is the cockroach. The rat is definitely going to outlive us, and everything that outlives us is a reminder of our mortality. Another association I have with rats is the tale ‘Le Joueur de Flûte de Hamelin’. I don’t know the translation in English, and I wonder if it’s a German tale. It’s a children’s story about rats invading a city.
A man presents himself to the king and says he has a way to get rid of the rat plague. He plays music, the rats follow him, and he walks out of the city followed by a massive river of rodents. This image fascinated me as a child. Later, he returns and asks to be paid by the king, but the king refuses to pay. Therefore, he continues playing the flute, but instead of the rats, all of the city’s children follow him. This is quite a cruel story because, of course, we imagine the pain of the parents who have no say in the decision of the king not to reimburse the flute player, but I think the tale also has something to say about the way artists are expected to save the world for no fee. We are the flute player minus the cruelty.

It is a German folktale—Henrot really should have known in light of how dark it is. Brothers Grimm wrote about the Pied Piper (as the flautist is known), and the brothers have always lived up to their gloomy surname. The kid’s books they made are pretty damn merciless: age-inappropriate stories, heaps of terrifying, didactic life lessons, stripping girls naked and putting them in barrels of nails, eating children’s hearts and livers as punishment. Things like that.

It’s funny you say that because I’ve tried many times to do the tie-dyed, double-sided helix on T-shirts, but I always fail. I’m not rigorous enough to do a proper tie-dyed T-shirt, and it’s hard for me to follow linear, step-by-step processes. The image of the helix is right, not just because I’m allergic to linear trajectories in my work or thoughts but also because the helix is constantly in motion. Movement is an elementary force. It’s a way to protect ourselves from ideologies that are too solid. I see movement as every drawing and painting’s origin and end goal. Recently, I’ve been thinking again about the Baroque era and what the whole point and definition of ‘baroque’ is. There’s flow in the fold, in the hair, in the arm, and in the body being in convulsion. I think a lot about the role of animated things in moments of war, where people’s positions seem rigid, heavy, and solidified. Movement appears as a force of resistance.

Absolument.

My birthday, great expectations, deceptions, but overall joy. Long days.

As I see the word, I immediately think, ‘Fuck you, fox!’. A big ‘fuck you’ to the majestic animal. I think the fox is very much a trickster. It’s both a cat and a dog, but it’s also a wild animal. It looks like it could be domesticated,
but it cannot. It lives near man because he eats trash. Like the rat, the fox is an animal that, in a way, is a purge—an animal that cleans. He cleans by eating the animals that are too weak to survive or by operating to clear the garbage and all the leftovers. The fox has an instrumental role in
nature’s evolution.

Motor, movement, speed, fire.

The weight of knowledge, how heavy his intelligence was, stomachache at discovering how vast and big and interconnected things are.

The atomic bomb is man, is male, is masculine, is government, is the bomb. The bomb is the ultimate authority and bully; he always has the final word.

I don’t know what this word means. Does it mean, like, a list of names? I don’t understand.

I think, eyeliner; I think, I love her.

Me, too often. I recently found out it’s partly because I don’t wear my glasses. But I know it’s also because I’m dyslexic and have dyscalculia, so the first thoughts in my head are always, where’s the trick? Where is the code? Things are never readily understood.

It is necessary to survive, but it will also kill us. Narcissistic and borderline personalities are given too much attention and power these days. Where is Freud when you need him? Gregariousness and nationalism are unresolved narcissistic neuroses, and they are pushing humanity into self-destruction right now. Again.

I have so much joy watching them with my kids. I love that Beep Beep always wins with intelligence and by being light and fast, while Coyote fails because he uses too much force and rage. The new cartoons for kids are so moralistic and conformist, I find them unbearable. I love the anarchistic, cruel spirit of Looney Tunes.

The most important concept in an email. Not a friend of deadlines.

‘…does your love hurt so much? / Tell me why?’ Carly Simon. One of my favourite songs, especially because of the deconstructed drums, as if they had slowed down the track a posteriori. The clash between her high voice and the reggae style of the beats. These days, I listen to everything that has reggae beats and very sad lyrics, weird effects—a genre I call ‘dark dub’.

The cover of my beloved book of the moment, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Our show, Jus d’Orange, at Fondazione ICA Milano in 2023. You and I made such a critical exhibition of works, lines, zest, acidity, visions, and vitamin C. Since I saw The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant by Fassbinder, I always want squeezed orange juice in the morning. I’m deeply moved by the desperate attempt of this alcoholic, anorexic chain-smoker to start the day healthy. In the film, she asks her assistant to do it for her, and all her dependencies and her need to be taken care of are evident in this request. A freshly squeezed orange juice as compensation for the lack of motherly love.

For a long time, I enjoyed being in the seat of a foreigner. You can take a step back. You speak a baby language, like a seven year old, and you assume that many things can be forgiven. Or so you think. Initially, I loved being a child in the country, a foreigner. I put ‘child’ and ‘foreigner’ in the same category in the sense of not being fully in control. But I also see how vulnerable the situation is. I’ve never been interested in making art so overtly political that it can be understood in a minute; it’s never been what I do. I feel a lot of my pent-up energy would’ve been invested in saying, ‘OK,
I can vote; I can express myself’. I channelled this energy into Instagram instead, and I think many of us were slightly fooled by the idea that communicating our opinions on this platform would be enough. You could express your rage or fear with a sense of immediacy, but soon came the realisation that the small, illusory power the Instagram post gives you is a bit like a new ‘opium du peuple’—this drug that simulates the satisfaction of revolution but annuls effort that would be more constructive for social change. But it’s also a little bit vicious because we also need those social tools to create momentum. I think we’re all questioning the right balance and proportion. Being a foreigner is still a good position for an artist, though.
I remember John Cage said something like, ‘If you live in the country you are born in and are married to somebody from the same religion, you should consider yourself committing incest’.

I had never been to the Upper West Side before visiting the apartment I now live in. I think it was a little bit of a crush or a coup de cœur. I was still living in Berlin when I saw the announcement the real estate agent sent, and I was intrigued because it was the only apartment with no accompanying photographs. There was just a picture of the view, which they do when the apartment is in bad condition or poorly decorated. It was written that Susan Sontag lived in the building. So did Jasper Jones and Billie Holiday—no, Billie Holiday didn’t live there, but slept some nights in one of the apartments. That description really appealed to me because I am totally in love with Susan Sontag, and because I thought they would be artist friendly. It’s challenging, especially uptown, to convince the board to accept you as an artist with an irregular income. When I visited the apartment, I bumped into this tall man living across from what would later be my apartment. He said, ‘Oh, are you Camille Henrot? Are you a friend of Pierre Huyghe? I’m a teacher at Columbia in art and philosophy, and some students are writing their thesis on your work. What are you doing here?’ And I said, ‘I’m visiting the apartment’. He said, ‘Oh my god, having you as a neighbour would be amazing. I will write a letter to the board right now to recommend you’. His wife is a French literature professor at Barnard, and as somebody who has been living in the US for more than 14 years, it’s nice to know that I can speak French with someone close. There was this magical or miraculous encounter with the place.

One thing I adore about this building is that it looks like a fake Venetian palazzo. It’s a bit cheap, the way it’s built, and if you look at the ceilings, there are so many angles everywhere it doesn’t make sense. But I love these Upper West Side buildings’ very fancy entrances. They’re surreal. It’s like being in a movie, like a cartoon or a Saul Steinberg drawing. We had his drawing, View of the World from 9th Avenue, as a poster in my kitchen in Paris, and that was precisely the image of New York that I grew up with and fantasised about as a child. Plus, I feel like nothing is more satisfying than seeing how your culture is perceived through the eyes of a foreigner. I love the fake French moulure, the fake Haussmannian style, and this American mixing of Viennese, French, Italian, Gothic, and Scottish—like the Dakota building. It’s a bit like a European Disney World, kind of medieval. I grew up in a neighbourhood that was a little bit like that because I was raised in the 17th arrondissement, which had a lot of fake Venetian, Renaissance, and Norman architecture. They were trying to redo Renaissance. I’ve always had a sweet spot for people imitating something, and not doing it perfectly. Doing it with passion, but halfway. This is one of the things that made me have a coup de cœur for the Upper West Side.

Animal lovers, for sure. I just love how many dogs there are. People have an average of two dogs per capita. There are more dogs than humans. It’s fascinating because most of them are rescue dogs, so some of them are missing a leg, and they are blind, and a lot of them are extremely old. I was joking the other day that when I call a taxi, I have to anticipate that older people with old dogs will go in and out of the elevator. You need to expect that it will take 10 minutes to go down because there is no way you can rush the old dogs, barely walking.
This is healthy for New York because the city is so fast—a torrent, like a river, dragging you where it wants to go. It’s one of the things I adore about New York, but it also makes it difficult because you’re constantly moved and pushed in different directions. There’s always wind, there’s always the water flowing around the island. There’s no sense of stability. The shops are constantly changing, or people are coming in and leaving. It’s continuously in flux. I guess, in this context, I feel the Upper West Side has this artificial sense of connection with the past, even if it’s a past that Americans fantasise about—this sort of imaginary Europe. I find myself at home because it’s a bit of a fantasy world.

The other thing about the Upper West Side as a neighbourhood—it sounds a bit bougie—is the schools. It has the only public school with trilingual programs that I felt I had the chance to get my son into. There’s one in Brooklyn, but I went to a few meetings, and it seemed extremely competitive. So we got another place for Iddu, my first son; he’s in this school which is American, but bilingual. For my second son, I didn’t find a spot at the same one. He’s only three and is a bit resistant to going to school, which I understand. Initially, he was extremely enthusiastic; he would throw his shoes at our faces and say, ‘I’m calling the elevator!’ as a threat, or scream at everyone, ‘I’m reaaaaddddy! Mama, are you ready? I’m ready!’ That was the very first month, but now he understands it’s not ice cream every day, and you can’t just do what you want. It seems he doesn’t like the idea of going to school as much, or maybe it’s a phase of evolution, but he’s screaming often. Getting dressed and leaving the house is a big battle. He loves music, and he’s been listening to a lot of Missy Elliott and Bob Marley—we’ve heard them nonstop for almost a year. I bought a mini speaker to attach to the scooter when we go to school, and I play super loud music, so he likes to follow me. He chooses what we listen to. We used to play Latto’s ‘Big Energy’: ‘I like what I see / A boss like you need a boss like me’. Now we’re in the phase where we’re playing ‘Dangerous’ by Michael Jackson, and I always have feelings of self-awareness and shame. I try to reduce the sound when we come close to the school because I feel like we’re arriving fast with, ‘The girl is so dangerous’. Everybody is already thinking that.