Azul Jacinto Marino
October 17, 2015–February 28, 2016
33, rue R. Poincaré
57590 Delme
France
T +33 3 87 01 43 42
info@cac-synagoguedelme.org
The exhibition title, Azul Jacinto Marino, reflects the work that Rometti Costales have been doing over the past 8 years: polysemic, multidirectional, equivocal, and rich in multiple facets or interpretations. At first sight, the terms would seem to refer to three shades of blue (azure blue, hyacinthe blue and marine blue), but they also evoke azurite crystals, a plant, the sea and the sky, oscillating between these various worlds—mineral and vegetable, solid and liquid, visible and invisible.
But Azul, Jacinto and Marino are also common first names and surnames in Latin America and Spain; and in the artists’ own cosmogony, it is the name of a character that is at once a shaman, poet and anarchist whose real or fictional nature is no longer certain. This character enables Rometti Costales to unroll multiple narrative threads and a few recurrent concepts in their work. For example, Azul Jacinto Marino represents the concept of magical anarchism (anarquismo mágico), which the artists invented as a poetic, political game that runs from exhibition to exhibition.
The history of this imaginary concept rests on a few real facts: in 1953, one of the last representatives of the Durruti Column—an anarchist military unit fighting against Franco’s regime during the Spanish Civil War—went into exile in Bolivia. At the heart of the Amazon rainforest, the fighter decided to build an anarchist micro-society. Out of the friendly relations he developed with neighbouring Amerindian tribes grew a strange hybrid community, mixing anarchist doctrine (neither god nor master, neither law nor social hierarchy) with the shamanic experience, which makes it possible, through trance and magic, to glimpse a non-pyramidal vision of the world, where different entities co-exist equally, where the human being is no longer at the centre of the world but in the world, just like the jaguar, a bolt of lightning, a cactus, a shade of blue, a word…
What interests the artists in this meeting of two theoretically very different cultures, is the combinative power of two systems of thought, one political and the other magical. Thus in the work of Rometti Costales, fiction, myth and imagination are tools that can greatly enhance our ability to think about reality and political action.
The duo also draws from the theories of Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who developed the concept of multiperspectivism, according to which a common culture is viewed in relation to a multiplicity of natures, a complete reversal of the dominant assumption of Western thought, which considers a common nature in relation to a multiplicity of cultures.
This is why Rometti Costales invite “agents” of various origins to their exhibitions, seeing them as fully fledged exhibition authors that include this possibility of multiple perspectives. These “agents” could be: the sun’s changing light and its coloured reflections in the exhibition space, an insect, a plant, smoke from a cigarette… The artists let themselves be guided by the randomness and indeterminacy that these various agents imply, accepting the fundamental instability of the summoned objects.
–Marie Cozette
Press contact
Pierre Viellard: communication [at] cac-synagoguedelme.org
Partners
The project Azul Jacinto Marino is part of PIANO, Prepared Platform for Contemporary Art, France–Italy 2014–16, initiated by d.c.a / French association for the development of centres d’art, in partnership with the Institut français in Italy, the French Embassy in Italy and the Institut français, with the support of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development, the French Ministry of Culture and Communication and Fondazione Nuovi Mecenati.
Azul Jacinto Marino was conceived in partnership with the Peep-Hole art centre in Milan in the context of the project The Book Society #2 whose Italian component took place in Milan from June 12 to July 18, 2015.
The project by Rometti Costales was selected by the sponsorship commission of the Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques, which gave its support.
La synagogue de Delme is supported by: French Ministry of Culture and Communication, the Lorraine contemporary art authority (DRAC), the regional and departmental governments of Lorraine and Moselle, and the municipality of Delme.
La synagogue de Delme is a member of: d.c.a / association de développement des centres d’art, Arts en résidences and Lora.
