TIERRA MÁGICA

TIERRA MÁGICA
Yannick Cormier, Candice Moise

Third book of Light Motiv around carnivals in the world, Tierra Mágica tackles the rituals and masquerades of northwestern Spain.

Every year, the sound of bells comes out of mist that surround villages and try to announce the end of winter, we also hear cries and distant music. As we approach, we begin to distinguish walking trees, fantastic birds and more disturbing figures.

These processions seem to come from very far away, from the depths of time, from under the earth. The work of photographer Yannick Cormier transcribes the amazement that grips us when faced with these frightening and attractive characters.

Tierra Mágica is built on a rhythm of alternating black and white photographs (made with a medium format film) of misty landscapes and sudden appearances.

These masquerades have survived centuries and wars with little change. They can now be seen as the resurgence of an animist world preceding the Christian expansion.

One could almost say that those costumes embody the pagan land, in opposition to the divine sky: all the wild nuances are reinterpreted in the animal, vegetal, or chimerical ornaments.

In the end, this is a parade of sensations that oscillate between dream and nightmare, with Yannick Cormier opening the ball.

The black and white analog photographs go along with a beautiful text written by Candice Moise, a French scholar specialised in the study of masks.

« The masquerade affirms its right to be double: alive and dead at the same time. In the procession, there are masks, frozen faces, faces of death carried on living, jumping and acting bodies, and also animal remains, brought back to life on animated young people... Ambiguity appears in each silhouette, associating refined civility and dirty savagery, raw and delicate, white and black, all together, inseparable. Life and death: lively-death. »

Text excerpt by Candice Moise

To know more, have a look at Yannick Cormier's interview by publisher Eric Le Brun about his works and the book:

---

Technical features

• Release date: 4 November 2021
• Photographs : Yannick Cormier
• Text: Candice Moise
• Afterword: Cristina García Rodero
• Spanish translation: Michelle Ortuno
• Graphic design: Lucie Baratte
• Bilingual edition: french, spanish
• Book format: 21 x 25,5 cm / Weight: 0,600kg
• 140 pages  – 61 photographs
• Tirage de 900 exemplaires
• Cover on Wibalin paper – Hot foil for the title
• Phtoographs printed on Symbol Tatami 135 gr
• Text printed with a silver Pantone on Sirio Ultra Black 115gr
• Sewn glued, square spine
• ISBN: 9791095118206
• Public price: 35 €

---

Exhibitions and events

• November 4 – December 23, 2021: photographic exhibition TIERRA MÁGICA organized by the foundation RUINS in partnership with Light Motiv à La Maison Demeure (59100 Roubaix)
• February 12 – May 22, 2022: TIERRA MÁGICA photography exhibition at Nicéphore Niépce Museum (Chalon-sur-Saône, 71100)
• February 25 – May 7, 2023: TIERRA MÁGICA photography exhibition at Art and Photography Center of Lectoure (32700 Lectoure)

---

Press and booksellers' comments

Cliquez ici pour télécharger un extrait de la maquette.
Cliquez ici pour télécharger le dossier de presse.

« With this book, with this photographic work, Yannick Cormier offers us something very beautiful and poignant.

Those traditions which were able to resist wars, dictatorships, those moments when Human sees in Nature a friend, a force whose moods should be respected, are an authentic message. 

The planet lives without us, so what's the point of satisfying our bloated consumer egos?

Let's love her.

Let's respect her.

And one day we too will be half-man, half-lichen, but also small gods of outer reaches. ”

Frédéric Martin in 5ruedu.fr

“The impression is that of the emergence of a very ancient, pre-capitalist world, organizing ceremonies to celebrate the forces of nature and allow those of men to fully unfold their most fantastical visions.

They are strange processions of disturbing deities and unassimilable creatures.

Alternating portraits of masked, made-up, metamorphosed humans and beautiful misty landscapes – magnificent prints by Romane Angelo -, Tierra Magica is a book very unexpected, in this pleasing, in our time so flat, so subject to the most mediocre calculations. ”

Fabien Ribery on L’Intervalle