[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/0310_260309-Camille-Henrot.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tCamille Henrot\u2019s breakout film Grosse Fatigue <\/em>(2013) was a tour-de-force: it won her the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale, and ranked on two lists\u2014ARTnews<\/em>\u2019s and Frieze<\/em>\u2019s\u2014of the 21st century\u2019s best artworks.<\/p>\n \n\tBut it\u2019s been nearly a decade since she\u2019s shown a new film: her last was Saturday<\/em> (2017). This week, that\u2019s changing: Henrot is premiering her new, hotly anticipated In the Veins <\/em>(2026) at the reopened New Museum, as part of the sprawling exhibition \u201cNew Humans.\u201d She\u2019s been working on the 35-minute piece for over five years. This summer, European readers will have a chance to see it, too, at both Luma Arles and Copenhagen Contemporary.<\/p>\n \n\tAhead of the New Museum reopening, Henrot screened the film for me in her studio\u2014and reader, it was worth the wait. In part, it\u2019s a film about caretaking of all kinds during the climate crisis: scenes show wildlife being cared for in clinics, spliced among footage of children growing older and clocks counting down. But what makes it sing is Henrot\u2019s signature editing style\u2014associative, peppy, and highly visual\u2014which here, is by turns surrealist and sobering. The film\u2019s tender acts of care that only accentuate all the pervasive precarity: birds attempt flying again after injury or illness, with the help of a human hand as children are read animal-laden bedtime stories. Soon, you start to see seismic shifts at an everyday scale: when the kids\u2019 bathwater\u2014in one scene, dyed red\u2014spirals down the drain, that water feels like our collective future. <\/p>\n \n\tHenrot talked to me about parenting amid climate grief, the new work, and the difference a decade makes.<\/p>\n Art in America: <\/em>What prompted the idea for this film?<\/strong><\/p>\n Camille Henrot: <\/strong>I noticed something epic and beautiful in the hand gestures that come with caring for a newborn. It reminded me of creative work: like crafting and polishing, or how painting is also a lot of cleaning. I noticed there were parts of the experience of having children that I\u2019d never seen onscreen: parent-child stories are usually told from the adults\u2019 point of view, and there\u2019s almost always some drama. I wanted to focus on physical acts of care and handwork\u2014and how epic daily tasks can be, like feeding and bathing.<\/p>\n \n\tReading my kids bedtime stories, we\u2019d get to things \u201cJ for jaguar\u201d or \u201cP for polar bear\u201d, and I\u2019d think: these animals are actually endangered. I couldn\u2019t help but feeling like a liar. There was some hypocrisy, and there was no way to resolve it.<\/p>\n \n\tI became drawn to this cognitive dissonance between all the animal representation that is everywhere in childhood, but that completely disappears for most adults as we age. Yes, Grosse Fatigue <\/em>dealt a lot with our relationship to nature, but having children made me more intensely and emotionally connected to it. So in the end, it became a film about daily life amid the reality of the climate crisis, mass extinction and nature degradation.<\/p>\n \n\tI wanted to understand these mixed feelings, and that\u2019s where I discovered Jennifer Atkinson, who\u2019s been studying climate grief and climate trauma, especially among young people. A lot of young people are extremely depressed because of the climate crisis: they don\u2019t see a future.<\/p>\n That\u2019s one way in which it reminds me of Grosse Fatigue<\/em>: both are about how knowledge feels.<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s such a heavy topic, and I didn\u2019t want to do something didactic or judgmental or cheesy. While reading children\u2019s books with my kids, I was thinking about how things are presented to us, and how knowledge is constructed. Animals are often portrayed as cute or beautiful or perfectly healthy when in actuality, they\u2019re at risk. This is how I came to the idea of filming at wildlife rehabilitation centers\u2014most of us don\u2019t see or face the consequences of human society on animals in a direct way. I filmed a mother sloth who had lost her arm and her baby while climbing on an electrical cable and an owl intoxicated by rat poison. These rehabilitation centers show us that it\u2019s possible to extend the love we have for a cat or a dog or a child to other species\u2014a squirrel, an alligator, a sloth.<\/p>\n \n\tThe voiceover is a mix of a dialog I had with Dr. Atkinson, excerpts from a New York Times<\/em> article that frames the climate crisis a communications problem, and my child doing his reading homework. They combine into this kind of surrealist sonic collage.<\/p>\n What\u2019s it like to show a new film after all this time?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tI\u2019m really excited and very happy. I might have shown it earlier had the film been easier to fund, but it\u2019s also been good to have a long time to think about it. Especially since I filmed my own children, which is a kind of inflammable topic. Every time you put children into a project, you face the possibility of harsh judgment, because everybody feels entitled to have an opinion about how children are raised. So I knew I was walking on a very thin line, and I had to think about it carefully. For me, the climate crisis and mass extinctions have made the feminist slogan \u2018the personal is political\u2019 more relevant than ever.<\/p>\n The editing feels so central: you have this very associative, visual way of putting things together until they tell a story. You\u2019re accumulating a lot. How does it work, in your process?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\t\u00a0I make maps of concepts\u2014one map of emotions, one map of ideas, and a third map that connects both together. Working with my longtime film editor, Yann Chapotel, I felt it was important to accentuate rhythm and repetition. Repetition is central to care-giving, but also, I think one of the biggest adversaries to ecological action is the privileging of linear over cyclical time.<\/p>\n For me, the effect is that when you cut between acts of caretaking for wildlife, and then for small children, you feel their shared sense of precarity and vulnerability. <\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tYes, totally. And there\u2019s a shared sense of messiness: the dog escapes the bath, the children are dirty, and nothing happens as planned. I watched many films with children in them, and often they\u2019re portraying the sweetness of children; how cute and charming and curious they are. But children are also messy and kind of punk.<\/p>\n And you filmed them over the course of five years\u2014so they look and act quite differently throughout\u2014but we don\u2019t exactly watch them mature in a linear way.<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tYes; the film is edited similarly to the way that classical music is composed. The soundtrack, composed by my husband Mauro Hertig, has the theme of the night (winter) and the theme of the morning (spring). The themes alternate two or three times, and then both themes start to merge. In classical music, themes start to build toward a resolution. When that happens, onscreen I decided to show a medley of different children\u2019s birthday parties, arranged like a countdown. From that moment in the film, the editing becomes completely non-chronological\u2014more symbolic and visceral, dealing with the emotions of stress and relief.<\/p>\n Has showing painting and sculpture over the past years influenced the way you work in film?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tAs I was starting this film in 2020, I also began a series of paintings\u2014a commission from the Anna Polke Foundation\u2014called \u201cDos and Don\u2019ts.\u201d Some techniques I developed for that series wound up in the film, indirectly. I was working on \u201cDos and Don\u2019ts\u201d<\/em> while my arm was broken, so I started drawing on the computer using a tablet and stylus. With the film, it felt important to stay connected to the experience of childhood, which is erratic and playful. In some transitions between scenes, a hand-drawn line appears and you watch it erase one scene to reveal another, underneath. Because of the accident, when I started using digital tools more, I was using my left hand. I felt very frustrated and almost like a child, because I was basically learning how to draw magain. For me, the drawings in the film have the clumsiness and erraticness of a line that doesn\u2019t know what it\u2019s doing.<\/p>\n One of my favorite scenes shows one of your kids pretending to draw with a finger while lying in bed and looking at the ceiling. You make the imaginary lines come to life with your editing; it feels magical.<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tThe effect is also a bit inspired by that scene, too. Most of my films are both extremely carefully constructed and also total improvisations. I often edit in three different chapters so that I always have time to go back and shoot more. Not everything is written and then executed\u2014which feels really nice, but it\u2019s also complicated, especially when working with a team.<\/p>\n I could imagine it being hard to switch between feeling free and feeling disciplined!<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tIt was a definitely part of the privilege of having five years to work on the same project.<\/p>\n When we published our list of the 100 best artworks of the 21st century, six of the 10 were videos (one was yours!). And yet, every video artist I know complains that it\u2019s so hard to get support for moving image work.<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tI\u2019ve had that exact same sentence in my mouth so many times while working on the film. It makes me sad. Recently, I saw someone commenting about the current art market crisis, suggesting that what sells now is experiences, and also works that are easy to transport. I was like, wait! I have your medium! Film! But there are basically zero films being shown in art fairs. At Frieze London last year, I nominated Ilana Harris-Babou for a solo booth, and she was the only artist showing film in the whole fair.<\/p>\n I wish that surprised me! To me, your films thrive in an art context in part because they communicate so visually, and the sense of narrative is built through such associative editing. I think for too long, video art was relying on didactic voiceovers to do all the communicating, in an effort at being research art in the most literal sense.<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tThe narrative power of collage and the juxtaposition of ideas is one of the most precious characteristics of film for me.<\/p>\n \n\tI wanted to use the sound of my son practicing his reading lessons in part because I think we are all, in a sense, children in the face of climate crisis. We have such a hard time grasping something so enormous and complex. But also, we are all acting very childish. It can feel like a problem that is just too big for us\u2014so it\u2019s as if we respond: let me read celebrity gossip and watch Netflix, then maybe when I\u2019m an adult, I\u2019ll deal with it<\/em>.<\/p>\n I could imagine that having children would make it all feel more urgent: you have a personal investment in the next generation.<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tFor sure. At the same time, there are a lot of activists who don\u2019t have children who are the most dedicated to the cause, in part because parenting can really claim your life and your time. I also read many articles about how having children can compromise your engagement toward nature in the sense that the best thing that we can do as humans is not reproduce. I was a bit haunted by this idea, which Meehan Crist addresses and also debunks in the essay titled \u201cIs It Okay to Have a Child?\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tSo in the work, there\u2019s maybe also a sense of guilt: guilt over having children, but also guilt over delivering a world that is on the verge of destruction to children. This is also the reason why many young people decide not to have kids\u2014which is another conversation I had with Dr. Atkinson. The responsibility of the destruction of the world shouldn\u2019t be attributed to child-bearing people, to us as individuals or as families. In the end, projecting society\u2019s guilt on the one character in society who feels guilt most easily\u2014mothers\u2014is a distraction.<\/p>\n \n\tSociety likes to sweep unresolved problems like these under the rug, and that\u2019s where I like to go digging.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/interviews\/camille-henrot-in-the-veins-film-climate-grief-1234777705\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/0310_260309-Camille-Henrot.jpg?w=1024″] Camille Henrot\u2019s breakout film Grosse Fatigue (2013) was a tour-de-force: it won her the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale, and ranked on two lists\u2014ARTnews\u2019s and Frieze\u2019s\u2014of the 21st century\u2019s best artworks. But it\u2019s been nearly a decade since she\u2019s shown a new film: her last was Saturday (2017). This week, that\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1834171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1834171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1834171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1834171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1834171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1834171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1834171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}