On the occasion of her exhibition Água Viva at São Paulo‘s Casa de Vidro, Camille Henrot sat down with the project’s co-curators, Sophie de Mello Franco and Sam Ozer, for Elephant. They discuss her ongoing series of Ikebana flower arrangements, Bo Bardi’s influence on Henrot’s Silver Lion-winning film Grosse Fatigue (2012), and being a revolutionary.
When asked what comes first, houses or museums?, the celebrated, late Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi replied that “all should come at once.” In her current exhibition at Bo Bardi’s home, Henrot captures the complex spirit that defined the Brazilian modernist’s work and explores our contemporary ‘all at once’ feeling catalyzed by technology surrounding us in today’s world. Henrot revisits several works in her career, including early video works Metawolf (2002), Egyptomania (2009), and Grosse Fatigue (2013) to reflect on systems of knowledge and the rhythms that connect the universe to everyday life. Henrot also imagines three new Ikebana sculptures in collaboration with Sogetsu São Paulo to continue her ongoing series Is it possible to be a revolutionary and love flowers? (2012), a body of work which transforms her personal library into ikebana sculptures.
In this conversation, Henrot reflects on the origins and evolution of her ikebana project, which trace questions of grief, postcolonialism, femininity, pleasure, and power. Touching on figures including Clarice Lispector, Lina Bo Bardi, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Henrot’s conversation moves between literature, form, intimacy and politics, asking what it means to find consolation, community, and resistance through art.
Camille Henrot: In 2011, I decided to move from Paris to New York. I use a lot of found materials in my work, and many of the things I shipped were not allowed into the United States by customs. As a result, everything I sent was blocked for a year and a half. I was really missing my books – but I was also missing my language. I missed speaking French.
I started thinking about the meaning of culture, the meaning of language, and what translation actually means. Around that time, I came across a book about Sogetsu Ikebana at one of those street vendors on Sixth Avenue. That’s how I first encountered it. The book was from the 1950s and focused on an early shift within the tradition of Ikebana, initiated by the Sogetsu school, which sought to establish relationships with artists. The school in Japan had connections with John Cage in New York, as well as with Picasso and other modern artists. There were also images of Ikebana that incorporated found objects – objects that were not flowers at all.
I was deeply intrigued by this school of Ikebana. At the same time, I was in a state of grief – grief for my culture, grief for my books, and for the idea of the dialogue I could have as a voice among all these authors. I began thinking about how to represent voice, style, and modes of speaking visually. That’s how I came up with the idea of translating the books from my library into flower arrangements.
Sam Ozer: How did you choose which books to translate into arrangements?
CH: Many of the books relate to postcolonialism. The first time I showed this project was in Intense Proximity, an exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor. The exhibition examined the role of anthropology in postcolonialism, as well as in the deconstruction of colonialism and feminism. It was part of the 2012 Triennial at the newly renovated Palais de Tokyo – an exhibition that reflected the complexity of global networks and the increasingly globalised nature of the contemporary art world.
Sophie de Mello Franco: And how did you choose specific books?
CH: They’re not all my favourites. Some books I didn’t like, and some authors I strongly disagree with. But I find it interesting to bring together voices that share a similar mood while expressing very different positions. In a way, the Ikebana aren’t really Ikebana at all – they’re more like personalities. They’re slightly humorous, slightly unhinged, almost caricatures. They’re caricatures of books made in flowers.
SO: How has the project developed over time?
CH: Each time the project is shown, it grows like a snowball. I add new Ikebana because the work resonates locally – it’s important that the books are recognisable to the audience encountering them. When we first presented the work in Japan, I created new Ikebana in response to books from there. In Brazil, it felt obvious to work around Clarice Lispector. She’s such a profound influence on my work, and she also shares a deep connection with Lina Bo Bardi. There’s a bond in all of these practices between the intimate and the subjective – even the very small – and much larger global concerns. This relationship between the domestic and the universal is central to Lina Bo Bardi’s philosophy, and also to Ikebana, which is a spiritual practice connecting small gestures to something larger. Ikebana is like a garden.
SDMF: And you made two Ikebana for Clarice…
CH: I usually never work with two books by the same author, but I couldn’t choose. Alongside Água Viva, I also worked with The Imitation of the Rose, which is less well known but deeply connected to Ikebana. It centres on a housewife who buys roses to arrange at home, but when the roses appear too perfect, she begins to feel threatened. The novel traces a cycle of paranoia and anxiety triggered by beauty – by nature appearing too complete, too resolved. It’s really about the friction between the image of nature and nature itself.
I also made a new Ikebana based on Cannibal Metaphysics by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. I read it a long time ago and chose it because of its strong connection to French philosophy – particularly Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The book responds to French philosophy and anthropology by asking why philosophy is only attributed to white thinkers. Indigenous thought, he argues, is also philosophy.
CH: This brings me to a question drawn from Marcel Liebman’s biography Leninism Under Lenin, where one of Lenin’s colleagues says: “You start by loving flowers and soon you want to live like a landowner who, stretched out lazily in a hammock in the midst of his magnificent garden, reads French novels and is waited on by obsequious footmen.” In Roland Barthes’s lecture How to Live Together, which was a major source of inspiration for me, he begins with this quote. It suggests that flowers are linked to a colonial lifestyle – to privilege, to luxury. This is reinforced by the idea of paradise. The word originally referred to an enclosed garden behind walls, because only those with wealth had access to water and labour to maintain flowers.
Flowers have always signified luxury, perhaps also vanity – an excess that is simultaneously a loss, because flowers die. For this politician, flowers represent non-productive surplus. But I find it interesting that the quote also mentions French novels and reading. In a way, it already contains a defence of flowers. If flowers are novels, and fresh fruit is pleasure, then pleasure itself is not revolutionary – which I think we can all agree on.
SDMF: This question also applies to Lina Bo Bardi’s work. She built public spaces where pleasure was central – places where people could have cultural experiences that were genuinely enjoyable. Thinking about how Clarice and Lina both worked in male-dominated fields, the question of whether it’s possible to be revolutionary and to like flowers becomes very relevant.
CH: Actually, the question becomes: is it possible to be revolutionary and to be a woman? Flowers are so closely associated with femininity.
SO: This is also interesting in relation to your work. You’re often associated with large-scale bronze sculpture – something traditionally coded as masculine. Here, flowers appear as a more feminised form. Your Água Viva sculpture brings these together through the use of metal pipes. You and Sophie were welding in the metal workshop for days.
CH: I used pipes because, in Água Viva, the key element isn’t water but fluidity – circulation. Clarice Lispector’s prose is also incredibly fluid. I wanted the Ikebana to reflect that movement. But her writing can also be raw and rough, and I didn’t want the Ikebana to be too beautiful. The work includes rust – which is connected to water, as an effect of metal. The elements are in dialogue with the book, but not systematically. It’s intuitive. I’m interested in how literature can be translated into an object.
SO: That intuition really came through in the installation.
CH: Yes – we experienced so many coincidences, and a lot of luck. It almost felt like there was a protective spirit with us.
SO: Lina…
CH: I was so happy when you invited me to show in Lina’s house and to screen Gross Fatigue. Lina’s work was a major inspiration for that film. Her glass easels at MASP propose a museum without hierarchy – a transparent space where everything exists on the same level. That’s what inspired the idea of the window. Gross Fatigue is a “desktop film”, following the desktop of a computer – but Lina had already done this in space. What Google Images is now, she created in a museum. I wanted to translate that into time rather than space. She encouraged me to think horizontally – not through inherited hierarchies, but through personal taste and intuition.
SDMF: You mentioned the digital – can you expand on that?
CH: For me, the MASP easels are a material image of the digital, or a dream of what the internet could be: a democratic space for the free flow of information, without walls or hierarchy. Everything visible, everything connected. It’s like having countless pop-up windows open at once.
SO: Seeing the film here, alongside Lina’s objects, is extraordinary. It feels like a personal encyclopaedic museum – and it’s wonderful to see your other films here too.
CH: I love that everything in Lina’s collection exists together: sculptures, toys, bottles of alcohol – all on the same surface. You can feel that she understood culture as something organic, like a jungle. You might have an Egyptian artefact, then a Halloween costume, then a soap called Cleopatra. There’s always an origin, followed by a trail of objects connected through fantasy, rumour, or misunderstanding. It’s a damaged lineage. All the images in Egyptomania come from eBay – photographs taken by people selling objects. Yona Friedman once said you can understand culture just as much by what people discard as by what they preserve. Online resale platforms become another kind of museum – a museum of refusal.
SO: And the film in the kitchen?
CH: That’s an early film I hadn’t shown in nearly ten years. It follows young people going to a noise concert by Wolf Eyes, interwoven with footage of wolves filmed at night in a zoo. Shot entirely in night vision. It felt right to show it in the kitchen, almost like surveillance. The exhibition is very graceful, focused on beauty and harmony, but this film embraces chaos and noise. Noise music is almost the opposite of Ikebana. It also touches on wildness, how people project liberation onto nature, even when that wildness is carefully constructed.
SO: We’ve spoken a lot about grief, and about how Ikebana and reading relate to it.
CH: Ikebana has its roots in Buddhism, but even before that, it was practiced to honour a princess who had died. It’s closely related to the Western tradition of bringing flowers to graves. Ikebana offers consolation, a pause in a world dominated by productivity. In that sense, it’s very close to art. Art, Ikebana, and literature all emerge from the need to console the soul and confront death. In antiquity, there was even a genre called the “consolation,” writing meant to help people through loss. This project reconnects things that once felt inseparable. Literature, poetry, art, and flower arrangements can create rituals, ways of being together, that help us face the difficulties of life, including learning to live with death.
