Far from the France we think we know, there is a country that lives in close contact with inherited gestures and teems with communities that gather cyclically around symbols that withstand the passage of time. France Fantasia, the project that French photographer Romain Ruiz has been developing since 2018, builds a visual archive in which folklore and local identity intertwine until they become something new.
From the Ostensions of Limousin to the Breton Grands-Pardons, all the way to the carnivals of northern France, Ruiz moves through territories and traditions with a gaze that avoids any ethnographic distance. He steps into the processions, follows their rhythm, and shares their space. In this way, the procession ceases to be a simple event to document and becomes a living social device, a meeting point between generations and different worlds.
In a contemporary context shaped by an increasingly secularized and digitalized society, France Fantasia tells of an unexpected return: that of a deep sense of belonging, rooted in the land and in local legends. These celebrations are not merely surviving, they are transforming. Ruiz captures precisely this tension, this form of hybridization in which the past adapts to the present, maintaining its uniqueness while opening up to new forms of expression.
The result is a visual investigation of ultra-local identities in a global world. Every festival, every rite becomes a fragment of cultural resistance, but also a moment of collective reinvention. Here, tradition is not static but fluid, capable of changing without losing its symbolic core.
From an aesthetic point of view as well, Ruiz’s work moves away from more conventional documentary photography. In France Fantasia, realism gives way to a more ambiguous dimension, one close to magical realism. The use of flash, diagonal compositions, and a certain visual tension transform the scenes into something almost unreal, as if each image were suspended between reportage and legend.
In this way, the French landscape is transformed into a theater of contemporary myths, where the sacred and the profane coexist and contaminate one another. Masked figures, costumes, and ritual gestures cease to belong exclusively to the past and become active, living presences, capable of redefining the present.
With France Fantasia, Romain Ruiz does not simply document traditions: he questions our relationship with time. What remains today of ancestral rituals? And above all, what do they become when they pass through the present?
