camille henrot brings eco sadness to the domestic sphere
Camille Henrot’s In the Veins focuses on what it means to raise children in a world shaped by climate crisis, biodiversity loss and ecological distress. It was presented this year at LUMA Arles and now receives its Nordic premiere in Paper Planes, Henrot’s longest solo report in Scandinavia to present at Copenhagen Contemporary, the work moves between wildlife rehabilitation centers, care scenes, children’s gestures, circular rhythms and fragmented observations on maintenance, repetition, vulnerability and survival.
Animals arrive early in a person’s life, filling alphabets, cartoons, bedtime stories, stuffed toys, classroom walls, and songs repeated enough times to become instinctive. They build intimacy, imagination, and memory, and before children understand the concept of extinction, they rearrange their world through them, holding stuffed polar bears close while they sleep and talking to jaguars and owls through screens. In the Veins begins with the violence embedded in this contradiction. Many of the creatures that so persistently accompany childhood are now endangered, displaced, rehabilitated, or extinct altogether. The symbolic world that the children inherited remains densely populated with animal life, while the physical world around them is increasingly emptied of it.
Shot in part in Guatemala, Costa Rica and Arizona, the film lingers in spaces where damaged bodies are carefully and patiently handled, where care appears less as an emotion than as a task. Henrot turns to the smaller emotional and domestic dimensions of ecological collapse, asking what it means to maintain tenderness, dependence, and responsibility within a reality increasingly shaped by irreversible loss.
Camille Henrot, In the Veins (film still), 2026 | all images © ADAGP Camille Henrot. courtesy of the artist, Mennour, and Hauser & Wirth unless otherwise noted
in the veins: sustaining life through repetition and care
In the film, their arms hug injured owls, children paint their faces like animals, and a child floats submerged in red-colored water, suspended between tenderness and worry. Domestic care and ecological repair are beginning to collapse into each other. Parenting and recovery become parallel structures governed by repetition, exhaustion, fear, adaptation, and dependency.
Henrot describes her practice as one that protects ambiguity. “I don’t want things to be too literal,” the artist explains in one interview with Louisiana Canal. “The language of my art is coded and leaves room for interpretation. So I try to do that. I try to very fiercely protect the space for interpretation.”
This refusal of fixed meaning shapes the emotional structure of In the Veins. The film never settles into documentary, activism, confession, or warning, even as traces of all four remain present beneath its surface. Ecological collapse seems to be slowly absorbed into ordinary life. The stress of living through environmental collapse is intertwined with the routines of care: feeding, caring, cleaning, teaching, protecting, repeating. In the Veins moves to the slower paces of care and everyday life, allowing ecological grief to surface through repetition, intimacy, exhaustion and the quiet effort to sustain vulnerable life forms.
a child painted as a reptile
repetition, dependence and emotional inheritance
Seasons, sleep, growth, repetition, maintenance and physical rhythms replace the logic of forward progress. In In the Veins, repetition is existential. Care itself depends on forms of endless return as the same gestures recur daily, often without resolution or visible reward. The film suggests that ecological consciousness works in a similar way, as a prolonged confrontation with processes that occur on scales that are difficult to fully perceive while living them.
Henrot approaches caregiving as a physically and psychologically demanding situation shaped by asymmetrical forms of dependence. Previous work throughout her practice has repeatedly returned to these tensions. Discussing the long-running System of Attachment series, the artist described his interest in “the idea of soft work”, along the side “The ambivalence of this feeling, the exhaustion of the body, the corresponding expectation of maternal self-sacrifice.”
The film resists presenting motherhood, childcare, or repair as morally pure spaces untouched by exhaustion, frustration, dissatisfaction, or contradiction. Care appears unstable and unresolved, shaped equally by tenderness and exhaustion. “Like a strange seduction of repetitiveness, of child care,” Henrot notes, “it’s something that reminded me of my own childhood and how suffocating I feel surrounded by rules.”
This tension between affection and suffocation quietly permeates the film’s atmosphere, where childhood seems neither idealized nor innocent. Animals are loved but vulnerable, while systems of care protect while disciplining. The adult world is presented as a structure to which children must constantly adapt, learning codes of behavior, social expectations, and inherited anxieties long before they even fully understand them.
a child floats among sea toys in one of the film’s dreamlike scenes
inside the paper airplanes, the systems begin to unravel
Henrot’s broader practice examines these invisible systems that govern emotional and social life. Throughout sculpture, painting, drawing, installation and film, he moves through humor and violence, mythology and technology, intimacy and bureaucracy, instinct and social conditioning. Her works often expose the fragile mechanisms through which power is naturalized. This engagement also underpins Don’t, Henrot’s concurrent exhibition at The Perimeter in London, which features paintings from her ongoing series Dos and Don’ts alongside drawings spanning over a decade. Drawing, which the artist describes as a daily necessity, becomes a way of navigating the shaky ground between social instruction and personal desire, exposing the tensions between external systems of order and the unruly impulses that resist them.
Within Paper Planes, this logic extends outward across multiple installations spanning the past decade. In Interphones (2015), automated telephone systems offer emotionally manipulative forms of pseudo-empathy before proceeding to invasive data mining. The Office of Unreplied Emails (2016) turns spam and one-sided digital communication into endless emotional performance. Bronze sculptures from Henrot’s Abacus series bend systems of order into unstable, corporeal forms, while drawings and paintings oscillate between absurdity, humor, cruelty and domestic observation.
However, even if these works critique systems of technological, emotional, or social control, Henrot rarely approaches them solely through cynicism. Humor remains central to her practice precisely because of its proximity to pain. “Humor is a defense mechanism against cruelty, violence and abuse of power,” she explains. Comics, animation and caricature recur throughout her visual language as structures capable of containing contradiction.
designed interventions overlay close-up images of wildlife, merging observation with imagination and interpretation
imagination persists alongside ecological fragility
This coexistence of playfulness and horror becomes particularly visible within In the Veins. Children imitate animals through drawing and gestures, real animals appear injured, displaced or dependent on rehabilitation infrastructures created in response to ecological disaster. Imagination and extinction exist side by side. A paper airplane can still become a bird in the hands of a child, but the conditions that sustain real birds are becoming increasingly precarious.
The title of the exhibition, Paper Planes, extends this to a broader proposal for the imagination. In the hands of a child, a sheet of paper can become a bird, a weapon, a map or an airplane, still open to endless transformations and possibilities. Henrot posits this openness as a mode of perception that adulthood suppresses through systems of utility, productivity, and social conditioning.
“Caring for the world”, the text of the report suggests, “first we have to be able to imagine it differently.”
This proposition also runs throughout In the Veins, though the film remains careful not to turn fantasy into optimism. Animals survive through intervention, but survival itself seems fragile and temporary. The film repeatedly returns to forms of maintenance, where care becomes meaningful precisely because it happens without guarantees.
In the Veins was presented at LUMA Arles
remaining accountable to vulnerable life forms
Henrot’s resistance to singular interpretation allows these contradictions to remain active. “I think there’s something about the super-personal,” she reflects “what seems the most personal, the most subjective and the most anecdotal has universal resonance.” The emotional power of In the Veins lies in the way it moves between scales, connecting planetary extinction with ordinary domestic gestures and ecological collapse with the intimacy of touch.
Ecological grief circulates through routines, objects, educational systems, bodily habits, and inherited fears. A child learns animal names while species become extinct. A caregiver repeats the same gestures every day with no certainty of the future these gestures prepare one to inhabit. In the Veins remains within this instability, which suggests no clear vision of nature, no return to innocence, no technological resolution.
Fragile acts of care are all that remain: caring for injured animals, teaching children, sustaining life through repetition, even when faced with the limits of control.
Near the end of her Louisiana Channel interview, Henrot reflects on the impossibility of comprehensive explanation within art itself. “I don’t think artwork should communicate as clearly as a newspaper essay. she says. “I’m not a journalist, I’m not a politician, I’m just trying to understand the world I live in and maybe understand it a little or at least respect its nonsense.” Her film inhabits this shaky ground between understanding and uncertainty. Henrot turns to repetition, dependency, emotional ambiguity, small rituals of repair, and the difficult work of remaining accountable to vulnerable life forms.
