Highly imaginative stories, images that become stories, and mosaics with teeth are the focus of Raymond et Des Palmes, Francesco Cavaliere and Leonardo Pivi’s contribution to the collective exhibition Raymond curated by Luca Trevisani, and in collaboration with Olaf Nicolai, as a collateral event to the Palermitan edition of Manifesta 12 in 2018. The exhibition, an homage to Raymond Roussel, takes place at the Grand Hotel et des Palmes - where Roussel was found dead in 1933 - and finds the inspiration to articulate a vast range of arts within his thoughts and his tortuous labyrinthine writings.

With Raymond et des Palmes Cavaliere and Pivi produce a visual, auditory and performative framework that allows Francesco Cavaliere to narrate a fictional story. Cavaliere holds the mosaics - created in an intense collaboration between the two artists - in his hands as if they were books to “read” to the spectators. Sijuaq il chiurlo Veggente (Sijuaq the Seer Curlew) is the title of the story where the actions of some mysterious characters come together in a fairytale. Sordente, an inhabitant of the underworld obsessed with finding a magical honey made by double swallows, is helped by a curlew named Sijuac who, with his aerial view, guides Sordente’s meanderings through the underworld to find his treasure. Sordente’s big break materializes when he meets two researchers – the artists’ alter egos? - who, during their explorations, had met Solimandante, the emissary of the Leucantaux family, en route to deliver the magical substance to his clients. After tasting some of the precious nectar that had been accidentally dropped, the two researchers haphazardly discover that its effect is to make teeth grow to excess.

The mosaics presented in Raymond et des Palmes, with their crude hardness of stone, glass and other traditional and eccentric materials, among which human teeth, evoke an exotic and desert imagery. Oral narration and soundscape as well as an ethereal musical composition, are entwined with mosaics. Words, images and sounds permeate each other without any hierarchy. Those who observe and listen will experience a deep and suggestive mental trip even through the embodiment of a recorded album.