In 2023, Christelle Oyiri’s Venom Voyage set up its popup flagship in the entrance hall of gta Archives, the experimental architecture department of ETH Zurich. For the first time, the nomadic travel agency introduced the Swiss public to a comprehensive documentation of the French Caribbean and its history, framed in a glossy acid display. In 2025, the agency relocated for a few weeks to Glasshouse, an exhibition space founded by Gathering in London. The motto remains unchanged: keep spreading the travelling bug, as it has been done since 1972.

Venom Voyage draws its aesthetic from the multifaceted imagery of travel agencies, a product of the 20th century fuelled by the democratisation of international travel and the rise of leisure society. Today, brick-and-mortar travel agencies are mostly replaced by dematerialised online counterparts, but they still survive in two radically different forms: on one hand, franchised agencies linked to massive entrepreneurial groups and on the other, hives of independent and mono-territorial local agencies, promoting a form of diasporic tourism.

Whether franchised or local, travel agencies are entirely focused on idealising an exotic, utopian space-time — an elsewhere that is precisely “not-yet-here” and “not-yet-now”. This “other place”, suggested through tangible artifacts (local crafts and flora) and experiences (world maps and photographs) is often described as “paradisiac”, thus positioning the everyday place, by antinomy, as a “hell on earth”. In that sense, travel agencies are like terrestrial purgatories in the form of waiting rooms, where atonement for our sins is replaced by the deployment of financial capital for a momentary escape. It is no coincidence that this same divine parable is not very far from the arguments used in the early 20th Century to justify, spread, and promote colonial capitalism. 

Venom Voyage is not primarily meant to criticise tourism and the simplistic Manicheism that feeds it. What drives Christelle Oyiri’s interest is the heterotopic status of these outdated places, and how these liminal territories can become the framework of a deeper, more political and more personal reflection. Through the exhibited works, Venom Voyage tackles the poisoning of the French Caribbean with chlordecone — a synthetic chemical used in intensive agriculture since the 1970s. Despite being banned in the United States since 1976 after an industrial accident, chlordecone was still used until 1993 in French overseas territories. Its harmful effects (cancer, water contamination, disruption of biodiversity) are still heavily felt today. In 2023, French courts acknowledged the public health scandal, but ruled that no charges would be brought in the ensuing case. How can nostalgia of a native paradise still exist when that very paradise was already unviable long before the happy memory itself? How can one deal with a reality that is nothing more than a continuous concerto of contradictory images and narratives?

There is something of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht in these questions. In her TOURISTA series (2023), Oyiri presents a range of aggressive marketing slogans centered around travel, which she overlays with family photos. The intimate and sentimental value of these immortalised memories is numbed by generic messages: “JETLAG IS FOR AMATEURS,” “TO TRAVEL IS TO LIVE.” As a critical counterpoint, Oyiri’s GREETINGS FROM MY DECKCHAIR series (2023) invokes the same layout used by Bertolt Brecht in his book Kriegsfibel — a system of simple commented collages that oddly resemble the black-framed Demotivational memes that emerged on the Internet in the early 2000s. By commenting on archives and personal images, Oyiri seeks in the documents of her past the material to compose her present.

Oyiri uses words as vehicles for an inner reflection. Through company names, slogans, subtitled documents or offcial records, words and sentences act as hooks, grabbing the visitor to direct them toward their own thoughts. Here, the message does not hold any truth; it revolves around an invisible gravity center. The generic catchphrases hold value only because they lay on an image charged with emotions; the witty comments are only valuable for their relationship with the image they underscore; the facsimiles of offcial documents gain interest with the toxic goo they are stained with.

Acid pop colours, green slime, cartoonish atmosphere somewhere between corporate offices and Dr. Evil’s villain headquarters… There is a simple but not simplistic dialectic at play in Venom Voyage — a playful didacticism, almost fun, close to Brecht’s approach on theatre. In his comments on epic theater, Walter Benjamin suggests that the emergence of political will in an artistic environment comes primarily from the audience’s ability to feel relaxed. It is only under these conditions that astonishment can arise and provoke personal questioning, even engagement. In this evil pop universe, so familiar and yet so eerie, lies a deeper intention to implement in the visitor’s mind: the idea that something is not quite right in what they are looking at. That it’s not so simple, that it can’t be that fun — that it can’t be true, that reality cannot be this absurd.

Text by Simon Gérard