After 15 years in the little port town of Honfleur in Normandy, the Festival Chroniques Nomades is changing locations and settling in Reims. Claude Geiss, festival artistic director, admits humorously that he is “switching from cider to champagne!”. Le Grenier à sel, the sole exhibitio...

10.05.2012[ read full story ]

Removed from their social and cultural context, the masks, statues and ritual instruments that we admire in museums are bleeding to death from a lack of understanding. They were not created for our enjoyment, to satisfy our taste for exoticism and please the eyes. We can try stem the loss o...

10.05.2012[ read full story ]

The only belongings that slaves were allowed to take with them, as they were leaving their great kingdoms of West Africa, were their gods. They smuggled them out to the sugar plantations in Haiti and Brazil. There, under the effect of forced Christianization, syncretic religions were formed, ...

10.05.2012[ read full story ]

Deidi von Schaewen travels the world looking for what man builds , anything concerning architecture, thoughtful and timeless, popular or improvised. Palaces, shanties, scaffolding, temporary decorations mounted for ritual celebrations, : as many public objects that she can gather to cre...

10.05.2012[ read full story ]

Every year in Mexico, millions of pilgrims travel to the Guadalupe Basilica. There on the hill of Tepeyac, the site of Aztec ruins dedicated to the goddess Tonanztin, the Virgin appeared before a shepherd, filling his coat with roses and leaving there her indelible image.

10.05.2012[ read full story ]

Jean-Dominique Burton takes pictures because he travels, not the opposite. Humanity is his only subject and the portrait is the only method he uses. It is because he wanted to keep track of the people he met over the 6000 kilometers he covered in Burkina Faso that he took pictures of...

10.05.2012[ read full story ]

Jérôme Thirriot always returned to India as if it were his adopted family. Initiated to its culture at the age of twenty while learning to play the traditional tablas and the Raga, he experienced spirituality without ignoring the hardships of daily life, the rigidity of a conception of ...

10.05.2012[ read full story ]

Despite the Western misrepresentation of the animism of African religions, they share the belief in one God the Creator who is only accessible through the intermediaries of spiritual forces, energies emanating from nature and ancestral spirits. The fetishes are only the intercessors between...

10.05.2012[ read full story ]

Every year, in the heart of the Southern hemisphere’s winter, Earth is plunged into darkness, face-to-face with the Milky Way, our galaxy. In order to view this staggering panorama in all its splendor, you have to position yourself below the Tropic of Capricorn, where the center of the galax...

10.05.2012[ read full story ]

After travelling through Russia, Asia, and Oceania, Frédéric Lemalet was captivated – in the literal sense of the word – by Tibet: captivated by the beauty of its landscapes, and the spirituality of its inhabitants that reflected his own internal search. He regularly traveled to the Him...

10.05.2012[ read full story ]

The work of Heinz Cibulka, despite its great diversity of shapes, is influenced by his artistic background: the Viennese activism of the 1960’s ti which he participated taking pictures of performances by Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. The religious reference, particularly that of...

10.05.2012[ read full story ]

The rapid population decline in Russia was for me, in 2006 and later in 2010, the pretext for a lonely and introspective voyage across this immense Russian desert. Indeed, in 2050, Russia is expected to have lost a third of its current population. 
The largest country on the pl...

10.05.2012[ read full story ]

Known for decades in his native Romania and having produced many books, received many prizes, and exhibited in Europe and New York, Sandu Mendrea was nonetheless a victim of censorship in 1986. He made the difficult decision to leave his country to settle with his family in Israel. ...

10.05.2012[ read full story ]

The Bwiti rituals originated in Central Gabon. Several centuries ago It was at once a vision of the universe, a teaching, an organization of society and a therapy. Only admitted were those who had completed rites including chewing iboga root bark, hallucinogenic plants that changed perception...

10.05.2012[ read full story ]

Every time she visits Rome, Véronique Ellena likes to explore the city, taking photographs of her encounters with things and places. Today we join her during her aimless walk with the help of a video montage, where her photographs interact with each other and the music of the group Under...

10.05.2012[ read full story ]

Twelve diptychs for twelve Indian chieftains who lived in the 19th century on the Alberta plains, bordering the Rocky Mountains. There are twelve successive heavens located beyond these mountains, where the breath of the Great Spirit gives life and takes it away. Because the world was cr...

10.05.2012[ read full story ]

There are places that blow your mind: inspired and inspiring places that instill the conviction that here, in this place, men find themselves linked to something that can be called transcendance, cosmic or otherwise, that make them conscious of their eminent and fragile place in the un...

10.05.2012[ read full story ]