Camille Henreau’s breakout film severe fatigue (2013) is a masterpiece: it won her a Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale and made two lists—art news‘sand lintel– the best works of art of the 21st century.
But it’s been nearly a decade since she screened a new film: her last was Saturday (2017). This week, things are changing: Henrot will premiere her highly anticipated new work in blood vessels (2026) at the reopened Neue Museum as part of the major exhibition “New Humanity”. She worked on the 35-minute piece for more than five years. This summer, European readers will also have the opportunity to see it at Luma Arles and Copenhagen Contemporary Art Fair.
Henro screened the film for me in her studio ahead of the reopening of the New Museum—and it was worth the wait, readers. In a way, this is a film about care of all kinds during the climate crisis: scenes show wild animals being cared for in a clinic, spliced in with footage of children aging and counting down the days. But what makes it sing is Henrot’s signature editing style – associative, energetic and highly visual – which here is by turns surreal and thought-provoking. The film’s tender acts of care only heighten any pervasive instability: birds try to fly again with the help of human hands after being injured or sick, while children read bedtime stories filled with animals. Soon, you begin to see dramatic changes on an everyday scale: As the children’s bathwater – in one scene, dyed red – spirals into the sewer, that water feels like our collective future.
Henrot talks to me about parenting in climate grief, new jobs, and the changes the decade brings.
American Art: What inspired the idea for this film?
Camille Henro: I noticed something epic and beautiful in the gestures of caring for a newborn. It reminds me of creative work: things like handwork and polishing, or painting that also requires a lot of cleaning. I noticed that there were some childbirth experiences that I had never seen on screen: parent-child stories are usually told from an adult’s perspective, and there’s almost always some drama involved. I wanted to focus on the care and manual labor, and the difficulty of daily tasks like feeding and bathing.
When I read my kids’ bedtime stories and we come across “J is for Jaguar” or “P is for Polar Bear,” I think: These animals are actually endangered. I couldn’t help but feel like a fraud. It’s a bit hypocritical, but there’s no way around it.
I was fascinated by the cognitive dissonance between all animal representations that was ubiquitous in my childhood, but which disappears completely for most adults as we get older. Yes, severe fatigue There’s been a lot of dealing with our relationship with nature, but having children has made me more connected and emotionally connected to nature. So ultimately, it’s a film about everyday life in the reality of the climate crisis, mass extinction, and nature degradation.
I wanted to understand these complex feelings, and that’s where I discovered Jennifer Atkinson, who has been researching climate grief and climate trauma, particularly among young people. Many young people are deeply depressed by the climate crisis: they cannot see a future.
That’s one way it reminds me of severe fatigue: Both are about the feeling of knowledge.
This is such a heavy topic and I don’t want to do anything preachy, judgmental, or cheesy. When I read children’s books with my children, I think about how things are presented to us and how knowledge is constructed. Animals are often portrayed as cute, beautiful, or perfectly healthy, but in reality they are in danger. That’s how I came up with the idea of filming in a wildlife rehabilitation center – most of us haven’t directly seen or faced the consequences that human society has on animals. I photographed a mother sloth who lost her arm and baby while climbing a cable, and an owl that drank rat poison. These rehabs show us that we can extend our love for cats, dogs, or children to other species—squirrels, alligators, sloths.
The voice-over is an amalgam of conversations I had with Dr. Atkinson, excerpted from new york times The article described the climate crisis as a communication issue while my child was doing his reading homework. They combine into this surreal sound collage.
How does it feel to release a new movie after so long?
I’m really excited and happy. I might have screened it sooner if the film had been easier to finance, but it’s nice to take a long time to think about it. Especially since I photograph my own children, it’s a hot topic. Every time you put a child into a program, you’re likely to face harsh judgment because everyone feels entitled to have an opinion on how the child is raised. So I knew I was walking a very thin line and I had to think carefully. For me, the climate crisis and mass extinction make the feminist mantra “the personal is political” more relevant than ever.
Editing feels very important: you can put things together in this very associative, visual way until they tell a story. You have accumulated a lot. How does it work in your process?
I make concept maps—an emotion map, an idea map, and a third map that connects the two together. Working with my long-time film editor Yann Chapotel, I felt it was important to emphasize rhythm and repetition. Repetition is at the heart of care, but I think one of the biggest opponents of ecological action is the privileging of linear time over cyclical time.
The effect for me is that when you switch between caring for wild animals and small children, you feel their shared sense of instability and vulnerability.
Yes, absolutely. There’s also a shared sense of chaos: the dog escapes the bathtub, the kids are dirty, and nothing goes as planned. I’ve watched a lot of movies with kids, and a lot of the time they depict the sweetness of kids; how cute, charming, and curious they are. But the kids were also pretty messy and kind of punk.
You film them over the course of five years – so they look and act very different throughout – but we don’t exactly see them mature in a linear fashion.
Yes; the film is edited in a similar way to how classical music is composed. The soundtrack was composed by my husband, Mauro Hertig, and has themes of night (winter) and morning (spring). The themes alternate two or three times, and then the two themes begin to merge. In classical music, themes begin to move toward resolution. When this happened, I decided to play a mashup of different kids’ birthday parties on the screen, arranged like a countdown. From that point on in the film, the editing becomes completely non-chronological – more symbolic and visceral, dealing with emotions of stress and relief.
Has showing paintings and sculptures over the past few years affected the way you work in film?
When I started filming the film in 2020, I also started working on a series of paintings called “Do’s and Don’ts” (commissioned by the Anna Polk Foundation). Some of the techniques I developed for the series ended up in the film indirectly. I’m working on “Do’s and Don’ts”“ When I broke my arm, I started drawing on the computer using a tablet and stylus. Through this film, it is important to stay connected to the experience of childhood, which was unstable and interesting. In some transitions between scenes, a hand-drawn line appears and you see it erase one scene to reveal another below. Because of this accident, when I started using digital tools more, I used my left hand. I felt so frustrated, almost like a child, because I was basically learning how to draw. To me, the drawings in the film have a clumsy and erratic feel, like a line that doesn’t know what it’s doing.
One of my favorite scenes is when one of your kids is lying in bed looking at the ceiling and pretending to finger paint. By editing, you can make the lines of your imagination come to life; it feels magical.
The effects were kind of inspired by that scene as well. Most of my films are extremely elaborate and completely improvised. I often edit in three different chapters so I always have time to go back and shoot more. Not everything is written and then executed, which feels great but can also be complex, especially when working with a team.
I can imagine how difficult it would be to switch between a sense of freedom and a sense of discipline!
It was definitely part of the privilege of working on the same project for five years.
When we published our list of the 100 best works of art of the 21st century, 6 of the 10 were videos (one is yours!). Yet every video artist I know complains that it’s hard to get support for moving image work.
I said the same thing many times during the making of this film. This makes me sad. Recently, I saw someone commenting on the current crisis in the art market, arguing that what is being sold now are experiences and works that are easy to transport. I was like, wait! I have your medium! Movie! But there are essentially zero films shown at art fairs. Last year at Frieze London I nominated Ilana Harris-Babou for a solo booth and she was the only artist showing film in the entire fair.
I hope this surprises me! To me, your films thrive in an artistic context partly because they communicate so intuitively and the sense of narrative is established through this associative editing. I think video art has long relied on didactic voiceovers for all communication, striving to be a studied art in the most literal sense.
For me, the narrative power of collage and the juxtaposition of ideas is one of the most valuable features of film.
I wanted to use the voice of my son to practice reading lessons, in part because I think we are all, in a sense, children facing the climate crisis. It’s hard for us to grasp something so large and complex. But at the same time, we were all acting very childish. This felt like a problem too big for us, so we reacted like: Let me read celebrity gossip and watch Netflix and then maybe when I’m an adult I’ll deal with it.
I can imagine that having children makes this all the more urgent: you make a personal investment in the next generation.
must. At the same time, there are a lot of activists who don’t have children who are most committed to the cause, in part because parenting literally takes away your life and your time. I’ve also read a lot about how having children compromises your participation in nature because the best thing we can do as humans is not reproduce. I’m a little bothered by this idea, which Meehan Krist elaborates on and debunks in an article titled “Is It OK to Have a Baby?”
So in the work, perhaps there is also a sense of guilt: guilt for having a child, and guilt for bringing a child into a world on the verge of destruction. This is also why many young people decide not to have children – another conversation I had with Dr. Atkinson. The blame for destroying the world should not be placed on those who are having children, on us as individuals or as families. Finally, projecting society’s guilt onto the one character in society who is most susceptible to guilt – the mother – is intrusive.
Society likes to hide these unanswered questions, and that’s where I like to dig.
