Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue
The Frame as an Ordering Element of Hyper-Enactment
abstract
This essay aims to analyse the ordering role that the frame plays in Grosse Fatigue (2013) by French artist Camille Henrot. Presented for the first time at the 55th Venice Biennale, the work is a 'desktop documentary', which uses words and images to reconstruct the complex history of the evolution of the Universe and of humanity. With the help of some concepts taken from Object-Oriented Ontology, this article considers Grosse Fatigue as a ‘hyper-enactment’, a neologism used to describe the stage in which pre-existing images/objects (here well circumscribed by desktop frames) aggregate as both particle-weaves and event-objects, producing new narratives that prevent the punctual rediscovery of their references.
Keywords: Hyper-enactment • Camille Henrot • Re-framing • Grosse Fatigue • Desktop documentary