OFLUXO

From June 28 to July 13, 2022 Hatch presents Garage Band, a group exhibition that explores the notion of trace. The one left by our passage on earth, the one created by artists gathering their imaginations, and more precisely the one inscribed by eleven artists in a familiar and intimate space, close to the studio, in an old abandoned garage next to the area of the Goutte d’Or in Paris. Maria Appleton, Dalia Baassiri, Kara Chin, Nicolas Faubert & Gabriel Moraes Aquino, Léo Fourdrinier, Arthur Hoffmann, Jan Melka, Lorenzo Monnini, Felipe Romero Beltrán, Romain Vicari question what would be an “archaeology of the future”. Their ephemeral installations invest the space of the myths that found them and the enemies that threaten them to better understand the present. The trace that they will leave in this place, human or industrial, questions what, in this era, is immutable and what will remain.

Romain Vicari is fond of urban spaces, which he uses as his main space of expression. Here, he exploits a shallow industrial pond of the garage, 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.