Vincent Roumagnac

Introduction

Vincent Roumagnac is a Basque-French artist and researcher based in Helsinki. Trained in theatre, first as an actor and later as a director, he gradually moved away from theatre understood primarily as a medium for the representation of human drama to explore what it might become in response to ecological, technological and geopolitical transformations. Instead of reinventing theatre’s forms within the boundaries of its discipline and architecture, he relocates its operations and rituals. His work asks how the stage might shift from an anthropocentric space of representation towards a relational milieu in which humans, other-than-humans, landscapes, architectures, technologies, algorithms, data and memories participate in the composition of the theatrical event.
Working across scenography, installation, performance, visual arts and artistic research, Roumagnac develops site-sensitive interventions through what he calls a 'discipline-fluid' methodology. He pursues theatre by other means, allowing its practices and protocols to migrate into exhibitions, botanical gardens, archives, landscapes, digital infrastructures and other environments. This practice has led him to formulate 'redirecting', which transforms directing into a practice of reorienting relations, agencies, temporalities and materialities, and 're-ecologising theatre', an artistic research into how theatre’s inherited distributions of agency, centrality, temporality and visibility can be exposed and recomposed. His works activate situations in which ecological interdependencies, memory and other-than-human agencies operate as active components of the event instead of remaining themes of representation.
This approach took shape through his doctoral artistic research project Reacclimating the Stage (2015–2020) and was further developed through the postdoctoral project Data Ocean Theatre (2021–2025). Since 2025, he has been developing the long-term artistic research project Floral Dramaturgies, extending this research through flowers and their ecological, political, technological and theatrical relations. Roumagnac approaches artistic research as an ecosystem in which art-making, situated encounters, collective re-sensing, exposition and further experimentation participate in the production and circulation of knowledge/imaginary. Since 2021, he has been affiliated with the University of the Arts Helsinki (Uniarts Helsinki) as a visiting researcher, where he teaches and supervises across performance, visual and installation arts, theatre ecology, expanded scenography, ecodramaturgy, site-sensitive practices and artistic research.
Since 2010, Roumagnac has collaborated with Finnish choreographer Simo Kellokumpu and, since 2012, with French visual artist Aurélie Pétrel. In 2020, as part of his duo with Pétrel, he was awarded the Villa Kujoyama Residency Prize. His solo and collaborative projects have been presented internationally, including at Centre Pompidou (Paris), MAMC+ (Saint-Étienne), Comédie de Caen, Kiasma (Helsinki), Zodiak (Helsinki), Hiroshima Art Document, Tokyo Arts and Space, Darling Foundry (Montreal), Transmediale (Berlin), the Research Pavilion (Venice), Prague Quadrennial and Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires). His works are held in the public collections of Kiasma Helsinki, MAC Lyon and MAMC+ Saint-Étienne, as well as in private collections.
His collaborative practice with Aurélie Pétrel, Pétrel I Roumagnac (duo), is represented by Galerie Valeria Cetraro, Paris.

Website: http://www.vincentroumagnac.com