Vincent Roumagnac

Introduction

Vincent Roumagnac is a Basque-French artist and researcher based in Helsinki. Trained in (straight) theatre, first as an actor and later as a director, he gradually moved away from theatre as a medium of human drama representation to explore what it might become in response to ecological, technological, and geopolitical transformations within what he coined as a discipline-fluid methodology. Instead of reinventing theatre’s forms, he relocates its operations and rituals. His work explores how the stage can shift from an anthropocentric space of representation to a relational milieu in which humans, other-than-humans, landscapes, architectures, technologies, algorithms, data, and memories participate in a shared (eco)dramaturgy.

Working across scenography, installation, performance, visual arts and artistic research, Roumagnac develops site-sensitive interventions that investigate what he calls re-ecologising theatre. Beyond producing installations from and for theatre (as discipline/institution), he pursues theatre by other means, relocating its operations into exhibitions, botanical gardens, archives, landscapes, digital infrastructures, and other environments. Through what he calls redirecting, he transforms directing into a practice of reorienting relations, agencies, temporalities, and materialities. His works do not stage narratives so much as they compose situations of coexistence, where ecological interdependencies, memory, and other-than-human agencies become active procedures of composition rather than themes of representation.

This approach took shape through his doctoral artistic research project Reacclimating the Stage (2015-2020) and was further developed in the four-year postdoctoral project Data Ocean Theatre (2020-2025). Since 2025, he has been developing the long-term artistic research project Floral Dramaturgies (2025–2030), extending this investigation into the ecological and political genealogies of Western theatre. He understands artistic research as an ecosystemic practice in which concepts emerge through art-making and are disseminated through experiential, collaborative, and sensory modes of collective knowledge production. Since 2021, he has been affiliated with the University of the Arts Helsinki (Uniarts Helsinki) as a visiting researcher, where he supervises students and teaches across the intersecting fields of performance, visual and installation arts, theatre ecology, ecodramaturgy, site-sensitive practices, artistic research, and interdisciplinary methodologies.

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 in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Lithuania, Iceland, Argentina, Japan, and Canada, 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