Marguerite Humeau (born 1986)[ is a French visual artist living in London.
Her ‘Migrations’ is a new body of work made from biological and synthetic resin and polymers, salt, algae, seaweed, bone, pigments, mineral dust, ocean plastic, glass, and stainless steel. The installation at The Venice Biennale is composed of three sculptures named after ocean currents: El Niño, La Niña, and Kuroshio. Somewhere between levitating, collapsing, and almost flying away, the three sea creatures of the artist’s mythological ecosystem express an understanding of mortality that transcends the domain of humans.
“I thought that maybe because of climate change and mass extinctions, animals are also getting conscious of their own death, and maybe they’re developing their own rituals, mythologies, and spirituality,’ says the London based artist, “In the past three years I’ve developed a series of death rituals and dances, many of them about marine mammals specifically because I do lots of research around their existing rituals” she adds.
“When you look at many religions around the world, or grand narratives, or mythologies, they’re all connected one way or another to the idea of eternal life or questions like, ‘where do we go after we die?’ or, ‘do we get reborn?’. So I thought that maybe because of climate change and mass extinctions, animals are also getting conscious of their own death, and maybe they’re developing their own rituals, mythologies, and spirituality. In the past three years I’ve developed a series of death rituals and dances, many of them about marine mammals specifically because I do lots of research around their existing rituals. Actually one of the inspirations behind the show in Venice comes from a video I saw of a female whale that was carrying a baby that had just died. For many weeks she was carrying it on her head. For this work specifically, I was also thinking about climate change, the rise of the water, and especially in Venice because the water is so overwhelmingly present everywhere; it seems that the city is counting the millimetres until it literally drowns. What do we do when this happens? I guess we’re forced to migrate. So I was interested in the idea of migration, as in to be physically forced out of where you live to go somewhere else. But also the migration of the mind, the migration of the soul once you die. I was thinking about a group of marine mammals who are migrating. The show operates on different levels. Maybe this is my most mysterious work, because there are different ways of interpreting it……… I don’t know if you experienced the same during COVID, but I felt that there was a huge change of paradigm. In previous works I had been more interested in accelerating life to the point it becomes eternal, through technologies or other means. I was interested in accelerating this process to the point when it becomes horrifying. This has totally shifted now, and I’m much more interested in vulnerability, imperfections, and fragility. There is something quite overwhelming about what’s happening in the world at the moment. Then, the figure of Atlas came to mind, the Greek titan who’s carrying the sphere of the heavens on his back. To be honest, I’ve felt very much like that in the past two years, like you’re almost overwhelmed by your own weight. Thinking about the challenges that we humans have to tackle, especially with climate change. It is very complex to understand how we can act on an individual level, what we should do to have a real impact in the world, and also how to manage those challenges at a collective level”.
Why did you name the three sculptures after sea currents?
MH: I named them after sea currents because once I designed them, I was showing the forms to different friends to test them, and it’s funny because some of them were like, ‘that’s not even an animal, that’s a plant,’ or ‘that’s a flower’. I got many different responses. I thought that it was so interesting, because it was almost like it was the entire living world that carries Earth in a way. In the end it doesn’t matter, they could be plants, they could be flowers, they could be animals, they could be all living things that are on a mission to protect something that they’ve lost, or that they’re about to lose. So I thought about sea currents because they are such strong forces. Also, they encapsulate huge ecosystems. For example, El Niño is quite emblematic of that, as it warms up or shifts, this affects many living things. And as the currents keep changing, they will affect all sorts of living organisms and the ecosystems will be transformed.
