Catalogue > At random

Mardin, Turkey, 2015. In a future where all is still to be built, between concrete and workers of a construction site, between Turkish and Kurdish, four young men read the story of an imaginary city : “in Heliopolis, two communities have gathered in response to the call of the Myth of climate disorders : the myth says that any life outside of the former abandoned City-state turned into shelter has become impossible. At first, life is organised in an organic dynamic, soon endangered by apathy where two archaic political systems resurface. A coup d’état is coming”. The text of Heliopolis – that I addressed to the people living in the area of Mardin as the consequence of political troubles I experienced there in 2014 – as much as the portrait of the four young men facing their own condition through the reading, are revealed by the film – and all the potential of relationships to be made between reality and fiction.

Conservatoire Supérieur de musique de Genève. Between 2001 and 2005 at IRCAM where he works as a composer and sound designer, he collaborates with visual artists such as Ugo Rondinone, Pierre Huyghe, Melik Ohanian and Thierry Kuntzel who open him to video art. In 2005, he shows his first performance, Dérive, at Fondation Cartier and Palais de Tokyo, both concert and shooting of the eponymous video where the actress Audrey Bonnet appears, with whom Romain works regularly since then. In 2007, he is an artist in residency at Palais de Tokyo and 2009 at Villa Kujoyama (Kyoto) where he exercices and sharpens his style, slow and singular. Back from Japan, Romain wishes to confront the delicacy and the permanency of his work to unpredictable and unsteady contexts, that drives him to shoot, in 2011, the road movie My empire of dirt across Turkey, from Istanbul to Diyarbakir (Kurdish capital of Kurdistan). In 2012, he creates Eldorado with Benjamin Graindorge, a video installation dramatising the stakes of its own creation : momentum, conquest and desire of the subject mix with permanency and steadiness of the pictures. In 2013 in Central Anatolia, he directs Marcher puis disparaître where the abstraction of a vast salt lake is put into dialog with the customs and the everyday life of a small Turkish city adjoining the lake. Benjamin Graindorge, embodying the walker, connects the two territories, so close and yet so distant. In 2014 in Turkey, Romain directs the video So long after sunset and so far from dawn, a face to face between an abandoned city at the Armenian border and another city, equally empty but under construction at the Syrian border. The ancient and the new, past and future are projected on both territories whose present is yet uncertain. At the moment, Romain works on two films whose themes are connected, approached from opposite angles : Été perpétuel (Perpetual summer) takes place in a summer house where Jeanne, embodied by Audrey Bonnet, revives her memory to mourn over both her beloved and an engulfed civilisation. Two sculptures imagined by Benjamin Graindorge are the vectors of this reactivation. Heliopolis, shot at the Syrian border in Turkey, is a portrait dramatising, in a future where all remains to be built, four young men telling the story : two communities gathered, at the call of a Myth, in an abandoned City-state where life firstly utopian slowly gets organised and clotted ; a coup d’état is preparing. A third film is currently in preparation with Benjamin Graindorge : La maison, where two men attempt to solve their contradictions through allegoric and organic dialogs. These films to come mark the appearance of dialogs within the work of the artist, who once again extends his practice.