camille henrot explores ecological grief through the intimate labor of raising children

camille henrot brings ecological grief into the domestic sphere

Camille Henrot’s film In the Veins centers on what it means to raise children in a world shaped by climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and ecological grief. Presented this year at LUMA Arles and now receiving its Scandinavian premiere within Paper Planes, Henrot’s largest solo exhibition in Scandinavia to date at Copenhagen Contemporary, the work moves between wildlife rehabilitation centers, scenes of caregiving, children’s gestures, cyclical rhythms, and fragmented observations on maintenance, repetition, vulnerability, and survival.

Animals arrive early in a human’s life, populating alphabet books, cartoons, bedtime stories, stuffed toys, classroom walls, and songs repeated enough times to become instinctive. They structure intimacy, imagination, and memory, and, before children can understand the concept of extinction, they reorganize their world through them, holding plush polar bears close while sleeping and speaking with jaguars and owls through screens. In the Veins begins from the violence embedded within this contradiction. Many of the creatures that accompany childhood so persistently are now endangered, displaced, rehabilitated, or disappearing altogether. The symbolic world inherited by children remains densely populated with animal life, while the physical world surrounding them grows increasingly emptied of it.

Shot partly in Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Arizona, the film lingers within spaces where damaged bodies are handled carefully and patiently, where care emerges less as sentiment than as labor. Henrot turns toward the smallest emotional and domestic dimensions of ecological collapse, asking what it means to sustain tenderness, dependency, 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 stated otherwise

in the veins: sustaining life through repetition and care

In the film, hands cradle injured owls, children paint their faces like animals, and a child floats submerged in red-tinted water, suspended between tenderness and unease. Domestic care and ecological repair begin to collapse into one another. Parenting and rehabilitation 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 an interview with Louisiana Channel. ‘The language of my art, is coded and leaves space for interpretation. So I try to do that. I try to protect very ferociously the space for interpretation.’

That 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 appears absorbed slowly into ordinary life. The anxiety of living through environmental breakdown becomes entangled with the routines of caregiving: feeding, tending, cleaning, teaching, protecting, repeating. In the Veins moves through the slower rhythms of caregiving and everyday life, allowing ecological grief to surface through repetition, intimacy, exhaustion, and the quiet labor of sustaining vulnerable forms of life.

a child painted as a reptile

repetition, dependency, and emotional inheritance

Seasons, sleep, growth, recurrence, maintenance, and bodily rhythms replace the forward-facing logic of progress. In In the Veins, repetition is existential. Care itself depends upon forms of endless return as the same gestures reappear daily, often without resolution or visible reward. The film suggests that ecological awareness functions in a similar way, as a prolonged confrontation with processes happening at scales difficult to fully perceive while living through them.

Henrot approaches caregiving as a physically and psychologically demanding condition shaped by asymmetrical forms of dependence. Earlier works throughout her practice have repeatedly returned to these tensions. In discussing her long-running series System of Attachment, the artist described an interest in ‘the idea of soft labor,’ alongside ‘the ambivalence of this feeling, the body being depleted, the sort of like expectation for mother to self-sacrifice.’

The film resists presenting motherhood, childcare, or repair work as morally pure spaces untouched by exhaustion, frustration, resentment, or contradiction. Care appears unstable and unresolved, shaped equally by tenderness and depletion. ‘The sort of like weird seduction of repetitiveness, of child caring,’ Henrot notes, ‘is something that reminded me of my own childhood, and of how suffocating it feels to be surrounded by rules.’

This tension between affection and suffocation quietly permeates the atmosphere of the film, where childhood appears neither idealized nor innocent. Animals are beloved but vulnerable, while systems of care protect while simultaneously disciplining. The adult world is presented as a structure children must continually adapt themselves toward, learning behavioral codes, social expectations, and inherited anxieties long before even understanding them completely.

a child floats among toy sea creatures in one of the film’s dreamlike scenes

within Paper Planes, systems begin to unravel

Henrot’s broader practice examines these invisible systems governing emotional and social life. Across sculpture, painting, drawing, installation, and film, she moves through humor and violence, mythology and technology, intimacy and bureaucracy, instinct and social conditioning. Her works frequently expose the fragile mechanisms through which authority naturalizes itself. This preoccupation also underpins Don’t, Henrot’s concurrent exhibition at The Perimeter in London, where paintings from her ongoing Dos and Don’ts series are presented alongside more than a decade of drawings. Drawing, which the artist describes as a daily necessity, becomes a way of navigating the unstable terrain 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 last decade. In Interphones (2015), automated telephone systems offer emotionally manipulative forms of pseudo-empathy before spiraling into invasive data extraction. Office of Unreplied Emails (2016) transforms spam messages and one-sided digital communication into endless emotional performance. Bronze sculptures from Henrot’s Abacus series bend systems of order into unstable, bodily forms, while drawings and paintings oscillate between absurdity, humor, cruelty, and domestic observation.

Yet even as these works critique systems of technological, emotional, or social control, Henrot rarely approaches them through cynicism alone. Humor remains central to her practice precisely because of its proximity to pain. ‘Humor is a defense mechanism against cruelty and violence and abuse of power,’ she explains. Comics, cartoons, and caricature recur throughout her visual language as structures capable of holding contradiction.

drawn interventions overlay close-up wildlife imagery, merging observation with imagination and interpretation

imagination persists alongside ecological fragility

This coexistence of playfulness and dread becomes particularly visible within In the Veins. Children imitate animals through face paint and gestures, real animals appear wounded, displaced, or dependent upon rehabilitation infrastructures created in response to ecological destruction. Imagination and disappearance exist side by side. A paper plane can still become a bird in the hands of a child, but the conditions sustaining actual birds grow increasingly precarious.

The exhibition’s title, Paper Planes, expands this into a larger proposition about imagination. In the hands of a child, a sheet of paper can become a bird, a weapon, a map, or a plane, still open to endless transformation and possibility. Henrot positions this openness as a mode of perception that adulthood suppresses through systems of utility, productivity, and social conditioning.

‘To care for the world,’ the exhibition text proposes, ‘we must first be able to imagine it differently.’

That proposition runs also throughout In the Veins, though the film remains careful not to resolve imagination into optimism. Animals survive through intervention, but survival itself appears fragile and temporary. The film repeatedly returns to forms of maintenance, where care becomes meaningful precisely because it occurs without guarantees.

In the Veins was presented at LUMA Arles

remaining accountable to vulnerable forms of life

Henrot’s resistance to singular interpretation allows these contradictions to remain active. ‘I think there is something with the hyper-personal,’ she reflects, ‘the thing that seems the more personal, the more subjective and the more anecdotical that resonate globally.’ The emotional force of In the Veins lies in the way it moves between scales, connecting planetary extinction to ordinary domestic gestures and ecological collapse to the intimacy of touch.

Ecological grief circulates through routines, objects, educational systems, bodily habits, and inherited fears. A child learns animal names while species vanish. A caregiver repeats the same gestures each day without certainty about the future those gestures are preparing someone to inhabit. In the Veins remains inside this instability, proposing no purified vision of nature, no return to innocence, no technological resolution.

Fragile acts of attention are all that remain: tending to injured animals, teaching children, sustaining life through repetition even while confronting the limits of control.

Near the conclusion of her Louisiana Channel interview, Henrot reflects on the impossibility of total explanation within artmaking itself. ‘I don’t think that artworks need to communicate in a way that is as clear 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’m living in and to maybe make sense of it a little bit, or at least to respect its nonsense.’ Her film inhabits that unstable territory between understanding and uncertainty. Henrot turns toward repetition, dependency, emotional ambiguity, small rituals of repair, and the difficult labor of remaining accountable to vulnerable forms of life.

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animated drawings and animal imagery intertwine

everyday rituals and childhood celebrations appear throughout the film

echoing the film’s recurring dialogue between childhood objects and threatened wildlife

an open-ended visual language

In the Veins juxtaposes scenes of rehabilitation, play, and environmental fragility

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disrupting straightforward readings of the natural world

reflecting on the animals that populate childhood imagination yet increasingly disappear from lived experience

an injured owl receives treatment at a wildlife rehabilitation center

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Camille Henrot, Office of Unreplied Emails, 2016 Installation view, Dissolving Margins, ICA Singapore, 20 October 2018 – 22 January 2019 © ADAGP Camille Henrot | image courtesy of the artist, Mennour and Hauser & Wirth