The exhibition title, Azul Jacinto Marino, reflects the work that Rometti Costales have been doing over the past 8 years: polysemic, multidirectional, equivocal, and rich in multiple facets or interpretations. At first sight, the terms would seem to refer to three shades of blue (azure blue, hyacinthe blue and marine blue), but they also evoke azurite crystals, a plant, the sea and the sky, oscillating between these various worlds — mineral and vegetable, solid and liquid, visible and invisible. 

But Azul, Jacinto and Marino are also common first names and surnames in Latin America and Spain; and in the artists’ own cosmogony, it is the name of a character that is at once a shaman, poet and anarchist whose real or fictional nature is no longer certain. This character enables Rometti Costales to unroll multiple narrative threads and a few recurrent concepts in their work. For example, Azul Jacinto Marino represents the concept of magical anarchism (anarquismo mágico), which the artists invented as a poetic, political game that runs from exhibition to exhibition.

The history of this imaginary concept rests on a few real facts: in 1953, one of the last 

representatives of the Durruti Column—an anarchist military unit fighting against Franco’s regime during the Spanish Civil War — went into exile in Bolivia. At the heart of the Amazon rainforest, the fighter decided to build an anarchist micro-society. Out of the friendly relations he developed with neighbouring Amerindian tribes grew a strange hybrid community, mixing anarchist doctrine (neither god nor master, neither law nor social hierarchy) with the shamanic experience, which makes it possible, through trance and magic, to glimpse a non-pyramidal vision of the world, where different entities co-exist equally, where the human being is no longer at the centre of the world but in the world, just like the jaguar, a bolt of lightning, a cactus, a shade of blue, a word…

What interests the artists in this meeting of two theoretically very different cultures, is the combinative power of two systems of thought, one political and the other magical. 

Thus in the work of Rometti Costales, fiction, myth and imagination are tools that can greatly enhance our ability to think about reality and political action.

The duo also draws from the theories of Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who developed the concept of multiperspectivism, according to which a common culture is viewed in relation to a multiplicity of natures, a complete reversal of the dominant assumption of Western thought, which considers a common nature in relation to a multiplicity of cultures. 

This is why Rometti Costales invite “agents” of various origins to their exhibitions, seeing them as fully fledged exhibition authors that include this possibility of multiple perspectives. These “agents” could be: the sun’s changing light and its coloured reflections in the exhibition space, an insect, a plant, smoke from a cigarette… The artists let themselves be guided by the randomness and indeterminacy that these various agents imply, accepting the fundamental instability of the summoned objects.

Marie Cozette