Yannick Cormier
PAGAN POEM
The photographer highlights this form of cultural identity resistance in so-called traditional societies or smaller communities that have not yet been fully anesthetized by the consumerist modern world. It is an attempt to reveal the mythological attitudes of these groups. But more than myths, his images show people playing with symbols — a sign of a culture that, confident in its traditions, can indulge in self-mockery.
His photography evokes the spiritual and the material, fiction and reality, tradition and modernity. His images are living representations drawn from nature, travel, social rites, religious ceremonies, cultural fantasies, dreams, and, more generally, from all playful or sacred activities that disguise identity and appearance.
His photography evokes the spiritual and the material, fiction and reality, tradition and modernity. His images are living representations drawn from nature, travel, social rites, religious ceremonies, cultural fantasies, dreams, and, more generally, from all playful or sacred activities that disguise identity and appearance.
Yannick Cormier "Pagan Poem"
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Pagan Poem
The Forms of cultural resistance to the homogenization of the modern world continue to emerge. I am drawn to the carnivalesque traditions of north-western Spain and Portugal—rituals that exist halfway between the sacred and the profane, between mysticism and paganism. In the same vein in Morocco, the Boujloud, a popular ritual of pagan origin celebrated after the Feast of the Sacrifice (Aïd Al-Adha), is marked by masquerades in which young men dress in the skins of sacrificed goats, embodying an archaic energy deeply connected to the world of ancestors.
Further east, the Toraja people of Sulawesi, Indonesia, feed my imagination. The spectacular nature of their rituals is rooted in their traditional religion, Aluk To Dolo, based on ancestral animist beliefs. It revolves around a continuous relationship with the ancestors, woven from a complex system of cults, myths, and rituals transmitted through generations.
The Forms of cultural resistance to the homogenization of the modern world continue to emerge. I am drawn to the carnivalesque traditions of north-western Spain and Portugal—rituals that exist halfway between the sacred and the profane, between mysticism and paganism. In the same vein in Morocco, the Boujloud, a popular ritual of pagan origin celebrated after the Feast of the Sacrifice (Aïd Al-Adha), is marked by masquerades in which young men dress in the skins of sacrificed goats, embodying an archaic energy deeply connected to the world of ancestors.
Further east, the Toraja people of Sulawesi, Indonesia, feed my imagination. The spectacular nature of their rituals is rooted in their traditional religion, Aluk To Dolo, based on ancestral animist beliefs. It revolves around a continuous relationship with the ancestors, woven from a complex system of cults, myths, and rituals transmitted through generations.
"These communities remind us that part of humanity has preserved deep physical and psychic ties with the living world, despite the forces of standardization shaping our era".
Across the ocean, the Zapotec masquerades of the Oaxaca region in Mexico extend this invisible thread. These communities remind us that part of humanity has preserved deep physical and psychic ties with the living world, despite the forces of standardization shaping our era. It explores paganism, Nature, symbolic identities, mythology, religious ceremonies, the animist spirit, megalithic sites, funerary rites, the shamanic universe, and various forms of exorcism. The project focuses on ancient practices that have survived by reinventing themselves across four continents: Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Africa. It is an attempt to create a work from these telluric environments, from these gestures, beliefs, and survivals that refuse to disappear.