21.2. — 22.3.2026

Opening Saturday 21 February 2026, at 13:00 – 16:00
Opening speech: chairperson of MUU Minka Heino

The installation by Vincent Roumagnac in MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre combines scenographic gestures, printed and video-based surfaces, performance documentation, as well as works developed through research collaborations with the Theatre Museum (Helsinki).

J’ai rêvé la nuit verte aux neiges éblouies* (I have dreamt the green night and Its dazzled snows) is an installation by theatre director and visual artist Vincent Roumagnac, bringing together works from the past ten years of his scenographic practice in relation to northern environments, alongside new pieces created for this solo exhibition. The installation extends the artist’s Backdrop series, initiated after his arrival in Helsinki in 2015, at the core of his doctoral artistic research at the time, Reacclimating the Stage.

Developed through the concepts of Redirecting and Simultaneous Environments, the work revisits the theatre backdrop as an active cultural and material interface. Rather than a simple decorative and peripheral support – a painted landscape at the back of the stage – the backdrop becomes, and performs as, a multidimensional environment in which geological, biospheric, technological, and cultural forces intersect and interact.

The installation questions anthropocentric representations of what we once called “nature” and proposes a rethinking of the “onstage” as a heterogeneous and shared milieu – human and more-than-human, pluriscalar and multitemporal.

In response to this year’s curatorial question posed by the MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre, “Where is the North?”, the work invites to reconsider the North as a constructed condition in constant transformation. The North thus appears as unstable, reshaped by the deconstruction of cultural heritages and representations, climate change, and technological infrastructures.

The exhibition title, “J’airêvé la nuit verte aux neiges éblouies,”is drawn from a line in Arthur Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre (TheDrunken Boat). Within the installation, the phrase also becomes the title and refrain of the song that plays continuously throughout the space. Evoked here, the verse echoes the artist’s own speculative vision prior to relocating and establishing a long-term life in the North, suggesting a dreamlike anticipation of a lived experience still to come.

VINCENT ROUMAGNAC (Biarritz, Basque Country, France; based in Helsinki, Finland) began his professional artistic life in theatre, initially as an actor and later as a director. However, He moved away from “straight theatre” practices and modes of production, focusing instead on how theatricality evolves in response to climate urgency and technological advancements, within what he has coined a disciplinefluid methodology.

His works, which merge visual, installation, and performing arts, are rooted in intervention and site-sensitive genealogies and ecologies. Since 2010 they have teamed with Finnish choreographer Simo Kellokumpu and since 2012 with French visual artist Aurélie Pétrel, with whom they are, in 2020, winner of the Villa Kujoyama Residency (France-Japan) prize.

In 2020, he completed his Doctorate in Arts at TUTKE-Performing Arts Research Centre/Uniarts Helsinki, with his artistic research project Reacclimating the Stage. In 2025, meanwhile starting the new project Restaging Flower Power, he publishes as part of the Acta Scenica series (Uniarts Helsinki), as a visiting artist–researcher at the same institution, the final exposition of his four-year postdoctoral artistic research project DATA OCEAN THEATRE, whose three main artistic parts were publicly shown at the Titanik gallery (Turku) in 2022, and in 2023, at Augusta Gallery/HIAP and at Kiasma (Helsinki) on the occasion of the Moving November international festival. Since 2020, Roumagnac has been co-hosting/curating with Simo Kellokumpu Pengerkatu 7 (now Hakaniemenranta 26) Työhuone in Helsinki.
www.vincentroumagnac.com