In the video series Humans I and Humans II the authors direct their attention not to something concrete, but rather to something that happens; not to specific subjects, but to the relationship between them and to the space in which they move. They look at a real situation and, by looking at it, find periodic repetitions that are associated with concrete places.

The situations that Ninou and Manubens have selected are those that take place when a group of people share the same space. In these situations, the people involved display a series of very specific psychic attitudes. It could thus be said that these videos act as a guide for that well known but abstruse cartography known as “the human condition”.

The first video (Humans I) was made in 1995 and it features the woods area in Parc Güell in Barcelona. Three types of characters (or even identities) are presented: the loners, the tourists and a woman who listens to the news being broadcast on a little radio.

The second video (Humans II) takes place in Barcelona’s Metro (Underground) and all the characters are one and the same: the solitary passenger filling with his body the train carriages.

All the scenes in both films where shot with a hidden camera. The amazing sense of naturalness that this procedure of image capture affords us, lets us, among other things, look in close proximity at the situations selected by the artists. Such is the proximity that we soon stop seeing the other and it is us who are in the spaces shown in the video, walking in Parc Güell, taking the Metro, listening to the news...