Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue takes on the history of the universe in just over thirteen minutes of fast-paced video. With pulsing beats and a poetic voiceover blending a wide range of origin myths with concepts from science and philosophy, the artist creates a hybrid narrative of creation from sources as disparate as Buddhism, Christianity, Kabbalah, and Diné belief structures. Cascading through countless computer windows featuring made and found footage, the video exemplifies its titular “extreme fatigue” through the sheer quantity and variety of visual information presented on a single computer desktop, an apt metaphor for the deluge of unfiltered information available in our digital present.
Henrot is a French-born multidisciplinary artist with a background in film animation, music video production, and advertising. She developed Grosse Fatigue during a Smithsonian Artists Research Fellowship, a program that gives artists access to the vast holdings of the Smithsonian’s collections as well as its scientists, scholars, and archivists. Some of these interactions are integrated in the video as brief clips of expert interviews and images of collections storage.
