Dreams of “hijacks and bird accidents” Camille Henrot’s cult object

What if our relationship with the world had never ceased to be archaic? Since the Enlightenment, Western culture has eschewed the irrational in favour of scientific explanations and technological advances. Yet, periodically, doubts surface as to the success of these advances, and with them the feeling that within each of us a core of primitiveness has remained intact. In the early twentieth century, Jung theorized on a common collective unconscious made up of age-old archetypes, while the Surrealists (Breton, Bataille, Leiris) sought forms of basic representation in non-European cultures. Today, Bruno Latour claims that we have never been modern1 1  - Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: essai d’anthropologie symétrique, Paris, La Découverte, 1991 [We Have Never Been Modern] and Sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches, Paris, Les Empêcheurs de tourner en rond, 2009 [On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods]. since progress is simply a disembodied fantasy, and facts can never be divorced from beliefs. The works of Camille Henrot concur with this line of thinking and reveal the primitivism of our relationship with the world, even in its most high-tech manifestations. In Henrot’s oeuvre, the desire to own objects, which we tend to associate with consumer society, is shown to be symptomatic of an irrepressible regressive impulse; distinctions between Western and indigenous societies are blurred, and linear time, a corollary of the notion of progress, is replaced by a cyclical concept of time. In short, all the certainties of Western culture are thrown into question.

One of the ways in which Camille Henrot thematizes the primitiveness of our relationship to the world is through the phenomenon of collecting, a pursuit generally considered to be relatively noble depending on the objects coveted — collecting paintings is deemed highly spiritual, whereas spoon or sticker collections are seen as rather childish. For Henrot, the act of collecting always stems from a complex and problematic desire. It responds to a need for accumulation that reflects a transference of emotion toward the objects around us and, in this regard, is never far from animist beliefs.