Yannick Cormier
Inauteriak
Yannick Cormier began his career as a documentary photographer and his images have been published in various international magazines such as the OjodePez, Courrier international, Libération, The Sunday Guardian, Le Nouvel Observateur, The Hindu, CNN, etc. In spring 2018, he moved to France, after 15 years spent in India. His works reveal a form a resistance of cultural identity by traditional societies or smaller communities who have not as yet been completely anesthetized by the modern consumerist world. It is an attempt to glimpse at the mythical attitudes of these groups. But more than myths, these images show people playing with symbols of a culture that is at ease with its traditions and hence can be self-mocking. His photography evokes the spiritual and the material, fiction and reality, tradition, and modernity. His photographs are living images that he discovers in travel, in social rituals, in religious ceremonies, in cultural fantasies, in personal dreams also more generally in all the games, sacred or ordinary, that distorts identity and appearance.
Inauteriak
A centuries-old tradition continues in the villages of Ituren and Zubieta in the Spanish Basque Country. During the carnival which animates the two villages for two days, the Joaldunak, strange characters dressed in sheepskin and bells hanging from their backs, parade through the streets to scare away evil spirits. The rest of the villagers dress up as demons and witches who scatter in their wake as the carnival symbolises the eternal struggle between the forces of good and evil; light and darkness, winter and spring. It is a time of disorder, or the "upside down world".