Dany Leriche and Jean Michel Fickinger travel all over the distant lands of Africa and Latin America, attracted by the mysteries of some surviving customs .Passionate adventurers, working together, they try to revive a lost harmony, by getting closer to primitive rituals and ancestral traditions. In the discovery of preserved humanity, by ancient beliefs, shamans, talismans, mascots, or voodoo, they live the experience of a new daily life, to a different rhythm. Their proven fascination for some rituals consists of looking at surviving civilisations in Brazil or Mali, in which the believing individual becomes a mirror of a sacred insubstantiality. This approach results in several series of portraits of unknown people, immortalised, dressed up, striking a pose, staring at the lens. In the long term, their approach consists of getting to the heart of different cultures by most importantly questioning the interaction of identity with the pomp and ceremony in the service of the sacred. Each of the photographs seems to follow Dany Leriche and Jean-Michel Fickinger’s introductory trip, which started as a journey directly related to the history of art. The two French photographers have photographed the Gnawas in Morocco, the Donso and the Koregugaw in Mali, three brotherhoods whose social role, based in ancestral tradition, is inseparable from their status as intermediaries between the visible and the unseen.
Dany Leriche et Jean-Michel Fickinger, The Korédugaw, last sacred jesters
From 27th March to 27th April 2017
Galerie Hélène Aziza
19, rue Paul Fort
75014 Paris
France
