'Truite arc-en-ciel' by Romain Vicari at Les Ateliers DLKC, Ariege

Romain Vicari is fond of urban spaces, which he uses as his main space of expression. Here, he exploits a room of the house, which has become a source for creation, to revitalize “Candomblé”, an Afro-Brazilian tradition of black magic resulting from a mixture of indigenous rites and African beliefs in a colonial context. On a crumbling floor are stored offerings with an important symbolic charge. To cast a spell, that is how to leave a trace. This scene influenced by the various Macumba rites, revisits this tradition by integrating recycled materials and more contemporary enemies, such as the capitalist system or the world’s indifference to the threatening climate crisis. Vicari’s challenge: to create a poetry of matter. 

In the installation he presents here, mechanical and organic elements, trinkets and pieces of objects evoke this charge of ritual, both sacred in inspiration and prosaic in construction. A miniature model, with an androgynous and animal-like appearance imagining a crab or a spider of the future, is accompanied by a video of a butterfly taking off. It reminds us of nature and technology growing and emerging from the ground, perhaps a tragic end, that of the end of the world? Our feet in the void, at the edge of this empty industrial pool, the spectator is invited into a meditative contemplation, that of the Romain Vicari’s Macumba. It is up to each of us to interpret what this esoteric-inspired metal dump reveals.