Globalism à la Française: A Conversation on Okwui Enwezor’s “Intense Proximity” Triennale

What does the concept of a global exhibition mean within a French context?

—Elvan Zabunyan1

When writer, curator, and theoretician Okwui Enwezor took on the artistic direction of the 2012 edition of the Paris Triennale (La Triennale), he approached France and its artistic scene from the perspective of an immigrant. Far from taking a universalist position—so dear to a certain French philosophical tradition2—he considered the reality of the country’s expansive global history and its immigration policies. Enwezor worked with four associate curators—Mélanie Bouteloup, Abdellah Karroum, Émilie Renard, and Claire Staebler—who he invited to breach the limits of France’s national frame of reference in order to encompass wider, more complex translocal and postcolonial contexts.

While revisiting the traces left by La Triennale, including the monumental 695-page catalog Intense Proximité: Une anthologie du proche et du lointain (Intense Proximity: An Anthology of the Near and the Far), and four digital journals edited by the associate curators, I have been struck by the simultaneous artistic and geopolitical density of this project. Held from April to August 2012 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and seven other associated venues, it presented works by over a hundred visual artists, filmmakers, and ethnographers of diverse nationalities and generations.3 I wanted to discuss this ambitious project with curators Émilie Renard and Claire Staebler, and how it came to fruition during a political shift in France which saw the rise of identitarian debates and the normalization of the far right.

La Triennale offers a rich case study for the e-flux journal series After Okwui, which aims to uncover new narratives around art history and globalized curatorial practice by reflecting on Enwezor’s critical and curatorial work. Although it has not been widely discussed, Enwezor’s Triennale articulated the challenges that globalization—and the movements of denationalization, decentralization, and de-hierarchization that arose from it—posed to the writing of modern and contemporary art history. Paris and its “excess of cultural capital”4 constituted, in Enwezor’s eyes, a fertile ground for revisiting the ethnographic model of otherness and reviving certain lessons from cosmopolitanism in the context of a tense cultural landscape.

This interview was conducted remotely in French in October 2024. It has been edited for clarity.5

—Mathilde Walker-Billaud

***

Mathilde Walker-Billaud: In the catalog for La Triennale, Okwui Enwezor writes that the event had its origin in the “rising visibility of a politics of anti-difference” and the public debates that this created.6 In 2006, he was profoundly affected by a New York Times article which described a controversy surrounding a French soup kitchen in Paris.7 This kitchen, supported by far-right groups, was effectively excluding Muslim populations by only offering pig-based soup. How did this French debate come into play in the elaboration of the Triennale titled “Intense Proximity”?

Claire Staebler: The article you are referring to, Mathilde, was indeed at the heart of our discussions from the very first meetings about La Triennale. What Okwui Enwezor pointed out in the “pig soup” episode were the new tactics developed by far-right groups to marginalize entire immigrant segments of French society, in this case Muslim people. He was shocked by the violence and strategy of these militants, and had the incident in his mind four years later when he was invited by the French Ministry of Culture to carry out a project on French territory. This constant interplay between what he called the “shallow distance and disturbing nearness,” and the ambivalent nature of proximity, was one of the pillars of La Triennale. We then moved on to a process of anchoring the project in the ethnography of the French interwar period, focusing particularly on how this material has been incorporated into modern film, photography, and literature, and what it generated in terms of concepts such as “neighbor-stranger,” “citizens-not-citizens,” and “belonging-not-belonging.”

Émilie Renard: Enwezor rooted the notion of proximity in the context of French ethnography, and this was of course a criticism he raised with regard to this heritage. The title “Intense Proximity” designated the acceleration of relations in a world where every distance has been shortened and every territory mapped.

MWB: The notion of “intense proximity” served as a tool for reconsidering the national frame of the invitation to La Triennale (formerly called “La Force de l’art” [The Strength of Art]), which had been reserved up until then for French artists. After reading the “pig soup” article and understanding the political uses of cultural traditions, Enwezor concluded that it was impossible not to question the meaning of “an exhibition in which the status of the national artistic scene and cultural visibility takes absolute priority.”8 He wanted to rethink French territory beyond its political borders, as a porous “contact zone”9 made up of interactions and mutual influences, a “land of migrations”10 marked by its colonial and imperialist history. Can you tell us more about La Triennale’s institutional history and Enwezor’s intervention in this exhibition model?

ER: It is indeed important to contextualize La Triennale as a counterproposal in its very model, both within the French political context and within the context of artistic institutions. As Claire mentioned, the “pig soup” phenomenon was a way for far-right movements to bring nationalist identitarian questions back into the media spotlight. In May 2007, newly elected president Nicolas Sarkozy created the infamous Ministry of Immigration and National Identity. When Enwezor was invited by the Ministry of Culture to take on the artistic direction of La Force de l’art in 2010, we were caught in the middle of unapologetic right-wing forms of expressions which promoted a national narrative of French colonial heritage. Suffice to say, for Enwezor La Force de l’art was problematic, not only because of its title, but also because of its implementation, structure, and methodology. He wanted to first bypass the objective of promoting the “strength” of the French scene, and to reformulate this representation of an art scene limited to a national territory, as well as the highly hierarchical institutional landscape that this scene comprised. He therefore sought to undo all the ongoing centralities, first by moving the event: instead of the monumental site of the Grand Palais, he established La Triennale in the Palais de Tokyo and other associated institutions around “Grand Paris” (Greater Paris, which wasn’t called that at the time). With regard to the geography of the exhibition, he wanted to show that alternative art scenes also have an immense part to play. He wanted to affirm that La Triennale could be a motor for the recognition of the diversity of the French artistic scene as well as an asset to enrich it, and not merely a mirror of the status quo. Similarly, from a methodological standpoint, Enwezor began by sharing the curatorial functions with four other people, and sought out artists well beyond national borders.

CS: He positioned himself clearly in his catalog text: he preferred to work with France in its globality, its link to its colonies, to the world, to its heritage … rather than working with contemporary French artists.11

MWB: Taking La Triennale out of the Grand Palais was a powerful symbolic gesture, when you think about the history of this building dedicated to French art and built for the 1900 Universal Exhibition. Its identity is shaped by the edification of France as a colonial and industrial power at the turn of the twentieth century.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Soup/No Soup, 2012. Installation view, Grand Palais, Paris Triennial, 2012.

ER: Exactly, and the Grand Palais, just like London’s Crystal Palace before it, is constitutive of the white cube, a concept eloquently described by Brian O’Doherty. It’s a type of architecture that establishes the primacy assigned to vision over the other senses. Enwezor’s answer is a meaningful gesture; not only did he move La Triennale to the Palais de Tokyo and seven other locations on the outskirts, but he also turned the Grand Palais into the stage for another play, with Soup/No Soup by Rirkrit Tiravanija. During this inaugural event for La Triennale, the venue was emptied and later filled with a crowd that gathered to share a meal. The space was organized in a horizontal layout, divided by tables and benches, on a human scale.

The exhibition “Intense Proximity” was principally located at the Palais de Tokyo, and it seems important to mention a few prior debates at the space. When Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans opened the art center in 2002, they made it the setting for a rather festive and spectacular experience of “relational aesthetics”—which Bourriaud theorized in 1998 in his eponymous book. In her 2006 essay “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents,” Claire Bishop criticized the apolitical dimension of Bourriaud’s proposal, positioning herself in favor of collaborative practices shaped by their own contexts of emergence and reception. Bishop used Tiravanija, one of the artists Bourriaud regularly worked with, as an example to criticize small-scale actions, akin to closed circles grounded in intersubjective relationships. Today, when I think about Enwezor’s invitation to Tiravanija to organize this soup kitchen at the Grand Palais, I wonder if he was bringing a large-scale political context to the conversation, as if in response to the shortcomings pointed out by Bishop.

CS: It’s true that Enwezor shifted this element of “spectacle” of Soup/No Soup, or in any case this image of an artform that is intended to build communities but ends up being considered an event reserved for the “happy few.” All of a sudden, this gesture went beyond these questions to return to narratives of giving, of “contact zones,” of hostility and generosity.

ER: In addition, Tiravanija wrote “FEAR EATS THE SOUL” in the entrance hall of the Palais. This sentence, borrowed from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s movie of the same name, refers to this fear of the other, a soul-eating racism. Here again, it’s not a monumental work; on the contrary, it’s very simple: written in capital letters with black paint applied directly on the wall, evoking the prevailing racism in France, right from the exhibition entrance.

CS: Right from the start, Enwezor wanted to highlight edges; the edges of Paris, of France, of Europe … The exhibition was on display at the Palais de Tokyo, but it was part of an ensemble, a variety of interventions and disciplines, places and temporalities. The first thing you saw when you arrived at the Palais de Tokyo was El Anatsui’s monumental intervention covering the Palais Galliéra. Here we can already observe a reflection about the Grand Paris project at its outset.

During the making of the exhibition, different worlds came together; some artworks required challenging production and installation solutions, tailored specifically for the Palais de Tokyo, such as the first iteration of Est-il possible d’être révolutionnaire et d’aimer les fleurs? (Is it possible to be a revolutionary and love flowers?) by Camille Henrot. The exhibition route offered a continuous evolution through universes that confronted and communicated with each other, with a great deal of freedom with regard to considerations of aesthetics, form, and scale. Lastly, some “islands” operated independently, with more interstitial interventions, such as Sarkis’s Frise des Trésors de Guerre (The Frieze of War Trophies).

El Anatsui, Broken Bridge, La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity, 2012 Paris. Photo by André Morin.

Enwezor talked more about positions than artists. He had a great willingness to innovate, to open the door for other fields and transdisciplinary practices. At the same time, his use of the exhibition space was fairly classic, with the presence of “museum moments” in the exhibition that contrasted with the Palais de Tokyo’s programming at the time. The loan of artworks with insurance value from major museum collections, such as those by David Hammons and Öyvind Falström, is not common in the history of an institution that defines itself as a “Site for Contemporary Creation.”

MWB: Could you expand on the role of the book Tristes Tropiques within the project? It seems that Enwezor turned La Triennale into a platform for questioning the legacy of this landmark work, whose author, Claude Lévi-Strauss, had recently passed away.

CS: Tristes Tropiques is definitely a cornerstone of the project, and an entry point to Lévi-Strauss’s pictures kept at the Musée du Quai Branly, which Enwezor loved so much. It may also be relevant to mention that the catalog cover is a photograph by Timothy Asch, in the tradition of Lévi-Strauss’s photographic collection practice. In the exhibition, we integrated a photographic corpus referencing other works by ethnographers and ethnologists, including Pierre Verger, Marcel Griaule, André Gide, and Marc Allégret. This set of photographic and film archives calls for different narratives around the close and the distant.

Alfredo Jaar, Le siècle Lévi-Strauss, 2007. La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Kamel Mennour (Paris).

Lévi-Strauss appeared elsewhere in “Intense Proximity” too, for example in Wifredo Lam’s Carnets de Marseille (1941)—a rather singular work in the artist’s career, but one which took on special significance in the context of La Triennale. This series of surrealist-inspired automatic drawings is said to have been produced on Captain Paul-Lemerle’s famous boat, which made the Marseille-New York crossing in 1941 with Lévi-Strauss, André Breton, and a whole clique of surrealist artists on board. Despite the fact that Lam and Lévi-Strauss didn’t meet on the trip, and that Lam didn’t embark for the United States, Enwezor was very inspired by these historical links. They affirmed his intuition that Lévi-Strauss’s work went beyond the scientific frame. It’s interesting to create a dialogue between Lévi-Strauss’s photographs and Lam’s drawings. Some cross-disciplinary links appear in the process.

ER: Tristes Tropiques is undeniably an important reference that Enwezor integrated into the project. He did this first by invoking Lévi-Strauss’s critique of the way ethnography exoticized non-Western cultures; Tristes Tropiques begins on a critical note (“I hate traveling and explorers”), which is not without ambiguity when put alongside the practices of international curators like Enwezor. Second, Enwezor echoed Lévi-Strauss’s assessment that a radical elsewhere had been lost, replaced by a world without exteriority; Enwezor likewise wrote in his catalog essay that “we are all travelers … we live in the relentless flow of capital, commodities, subjectivities, objects.”12 Starting from the observation that ethnography has forged our representations of the distant by associating them with an imaginary anteriority, or even a certain idea of ancestrality, Enwezor wanted to reexamine the photographic sources, the majority from the Quai Branly collections, in order to bring a critical perspective to them. This focus was visible in the display itself: it was important for Enwezor to keep the documents within the physical context of the archive, with the corresponding nomenclatures to organize them. This was particularly true of Lévi-Strauss’s photographic series (the portraits of Caduveo women in Brazil), as well as Marcel Griaule’s (the pictures from the Dakar-Djibouti mission), which were annotated, labelled, and exhibited with their cardboard backings. This arrangement provided information on the provenance of the images and their uses within the collections of a museum that is itself halfway between art and ethnography. As an indirect result, the setup also revealed hidden recording devices, whether photographic or cinematographic, such as those in the work of Jean Rouch and Timothy Asch.

Enwezor wove a whole genealogy throughout the exhibition, made apparent by the positions of artists like Georges Adéagbo, Ahmed Bouanani, and Joost Conijn. Other critical positions oscillated between fiction and document, as seen in the works of Lorraine O’Grady, Hiwa K, Marie Voignier, and Neil Beloufa, while other artists documented and provided testimonies of uncharted facts to compose alternative narratives, such as Eva Partum and Bouchra Khalili.

MWB: Enwezor said in an interview that “‘Intense Proximity’ deals with the poetics of ethnography, not ethnography itself.”13 How did this ethnographic gaze, which haunts the humanities as much as the arts—as evidenced by Hal Foster’s 1995 text “The Artist as Ethnographer?,” reproduced in the catalog—come into play in your own curatorial work?14

ER: Within our curatorial group, we each tried to define and problematize our own positions. I think Enwezor brought us together for our complementary positions, but also because, as curators based in France and Morocco (in the case of Abdellah Karroum), we served as bridges between our contexts. This reflexivity was induced by his own multicultural perspective, as a Nigerian curator who immigrated to the United States.

CS: He was extremely interested in people’s stories and paths. He made rather spectacular connections between dates, people, and artistic groups. I had travelled to Romania, Poland, Serbia, and Ukraine prior to La Triennale, and it was very stimulating to return to these contexts with Enwezor and to reexamine certain historical artistic practices in light of cultural exchanges between Africa and different Eastern European countries.

ER: The territories that we visited or planned to visit were precisely connected to this objective of identifying contexts that revealed counter-histories, whether a moment from the French colonial past or from a multicultural Eastern European territory like the so-called “Balkans.” The relationships between the Souths, between peripheries, between edges—everything that didn’t pass through the filter of Eurocentrism was of interest to him. I think this could be ascertained in the exhibition.

MWB: In France, we can mention Jean-Hubert Martin as one of the contemporary art curators who tried to depart from cultural Euro-American centers and grapple with a global scale through his famous and controversial 1989 exhibition “Magiciens de la terre.”15 While clearly critical of Martin’s ethnocentric postmodern approach, Enwezor acknowledged the French curator’s ambition to “address [the West’s] relationship to non-Western aesthetics and discursive systems institutionally” and the significance of his project to the development of so-called global exhibitions.16 Was La Triennale conceived as a response to “Magiciens”?

ER: It seems to me that Jean-Hubert Martin’s project with “Magiciens de la terre” was primarily to decentralize the occidental perspective on contemporary art that was still prevalent at the time, and to open it up to a global scale. But this decentering manifested itself in a strangely binary way. A major criticism made of the exhibition was that it established proximities between artworks on a formal basis, even though they came from radically different contexts—and always with an already-recognized work as a reference. I suppose this project was founded on an implicit—or typical—dissociation between aesthetic and political dimensions. I wonder if, in France, this contributed to reaffirming the bias that form overrides content and that, conversely, form is less relevant in so-called political art. I would say that within the framework of the exhibition, Enwezor put effort into offering a very dense aesthetic experience in which specific perspectives and political issues were expressed without losing their complexity. I think he helped to reintroduce the possibility of addressing political issues in France at the scale of a big event that offered prolific and intense experiences.

On the curatorial side, we traveled a lot, in France as well as abroad. You could say we took a similar route to that of “Magiciens de la terre,” where curators went in search of these “magicians” on every continent—although on a different scale and with different intentions. Our scouting work, which involved a form of field study, was motivated by a different approach: to see artists in their own contexts, within their institutional and intellectual networks, in order to better understand the social, collective, and personal implications of their practices. This work of investigation and recontextualization, as well as the encounters that stemmed from it, shaped the exhibition.

CS: When I think about it, there are other important aspects of La Triennale, more intangible ones, like music and the physical nature of sound—a term that came back often in our conversations with Enwezor, who was very well-versed in musical culture. One of the most moving and successful projects, in my opinion, was by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc. It was a great challenge to reinterpret the works of Julius Eastman, a little-known figure in American music at the time, who has since reemerged in many places. Between Abonnenc’s concerts, Tarek Atoui’s sound performances, and Konrad Smolenski’s sound sculptures, La Triennale shaped a full-fledged soundscape: raw, physical, and with rage.

MWB: Do you think that this departure from formalist concerns contributed to La Triennale’s lack of resonance, at least with the French public?

CS: I’m more inclined to think that the subjects covered by La Triennale were not yet widely discussed in France at the time. Once again, this multifaceted project opened up a vast field of reflections and references, whose foresight and resonance we are now discussing more than ever, I believe.

I also have to admit that, at times, the exhibition was a bit challenging, a bit unfiltered. Today we’d be looking more closely at the way the artists are presented, the way the public is addressed, and the language we use. In the context of La Triennale, this lack of mediation seemed to lay the groundwork for an unlearning structure—an issue I expanded on in what we called the Journal of La Triennale. If unlearning becomes a way to connect with the world—an individual or collective tendency, allowing everyone to rethink, renegotiate, and question our beliefs—then art, inevitably, can help us reshape our perceptions of the world.

ER: There is a certain radicality with Enwezor in his determination to preserve complexity and give direct access to artworks, without mediation. In terms of exhibition experience, he refused any clear chronological order or thematic focus. The exhibition brought together a great number of artists and authors inside the vast Palais, which had just reopened its doors with double the exhibition space. Yet the tools that accompanied the public were reduced to the bare minimum: simple labels, no headings or signage. Our interpretation of the works was only provided in the exhibition brochure, organized chronologically by artists. The exhibition offered no coherent reading of the world, and, likewise, wandering through these rooms meant composing your own itinerary and following several paths. And if you add the number of video hours, it was impossible to see everything in a single day. It was this overflowing effect, like “You’re on your own with this forest of signs.” There was a sense of profusion that displayed the condition of the contemporary world. An “Intense Proximity.”

Besides this intentional complexity, Enwezor also wanted to de-hierarchize practices by exhibiting artworks, documents, ethnographic photographs, and documentary films on the same level. Here we can observe the cultural studies framework of considering the artworks themselves as documents of their production, and conversely, considering documents as aesthetic propositions that compose a visual culture—a perspective that, at the time, was met with a lot of resistance in France.

MWB: How was this project, which attempted to deter any institutional strategy of large-scale visibility, received by the boards and partners?

CS: In my opinion, La Triennale did not get the reception it should have had in the French art scene. There was a real lack of awareness regarding Enwezor, his influence and accomplishments—even if this wasn’t the case with all the artists and thinkers we met.

ER: The discontinuation of La Triennale is in itself an admission of failure and sign of a lack of interest in the exhibition, when its model only required further deployment and refinement. Enwezor defended the importance of collective curatorial work to the boards, as well as an ethical approach to the choice of sponsors, which ended up having a significant impact on the overall budget. He had an impressive talent for negotiation and the ability to bend the terms of the invitation, starting by deconstructing and rearranging its very frame. His determination made this edition possible, and perhaps explains the resistance to continuing the project afterwards. In the same way, the complete disappearance of the website dedicated to La Triennale shows either a lack of interest from the institutions that initiated it, or dysfunctions in the valuation of such archives. The event has not been fully integrated into the history of the Palais de Tokyo either. I hope that the Palais’s team—which has engaged in a process of introspection around the institution’s history17—will acknowledge and archive this moment.

CS: In the end, it’s a bit of a miracle that it happened at all. The project was made possible by a handful of people, including Nicolas Bourriaud, who supported the project from the outset, when he was at the Direction Générale de la Création Artistique (General Directorate for Artistic Creation). Enwezor had this tendency to look further and further ahead, at a bigger scale, with more collaborations, more platforms … His project was a bit scary. It was reduced, but in the end it was still quite ambitious compared to what had been commissioned. To impose four associate curators and attach the Palais de Tokyo to seven other venues, that went far beyond what the Ministry had originally imagined.