TIERRA MÁGICA
Yannick Cormier, Candice Moise
As Light Motiv’s third book about carnivals, TIERRA MÁGICA deals with rituals and masquerades of northwestern Spain. Every year, sounds of bells come out of the mist surrounding villages to announce the end of winter. Cries and distant music can also be heard. As one’s gets closer, one’s begins to distinguish walking trees, fantastic birds and more disturbing figures. Those processions seem to come from far away, from the depths of time, from under the earth. French photographer Yannick Cormier transcribes the amazement that seizes us while facing those frightening and attractive characters.
The book rhythm alternates black and white photographs, made with a medium format film camera, of misty landscapes and sudden appearances. Those masquerades have survived centuries and wars with small shifts. They may be seen as the resurgence of an animist world preceding the Christian expansion. One could almost say that those costumes embody a pagan world, in opposition to the divine sky: all 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.
Les photographies en noir et blanc argentiques sont accompagnées du texte de Candice Moise, universitaire et spécialiste de l’étude des masques.
« 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
- Photographs : Yannick Cormier – Texte : Candice Moise – Postface : Cristina García Rodero
- Format : 21 x 25,5 cm – 140 pages – 61 photographies
- Bilingual edition: french, spanish
- Couverture reliée, dos carré collé cousu
- Couverture sur papier Wibalin – Dorure à chaud pour le titre
- Phtoographs printed on Symbol Tatami 135 gr
- Texte en pantone argenté imprimé sur Sirio Ultra Black
- Release date : 4 Novembre 2021
- Isbn 9791095118206
- Prix public du livre seul : 35 €
Tirage de tête limité de Yannick Cormier
Tirage limité au choix, numéroté, signé par le photographe
4 modèles (voir les visuels sur le produit)
10 exemplaires par modèle
Sur papier Hahnemühle Baryta 310 gr cadré dans un format 20 x 24 cm
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