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“The wolf is here; in my origin and in my words; in the air that separates my nails from my flesh. Your nails from your flesh.”
Los lobos is a long video that despite its length never gets tedious. As it develops, it adapts to the complexity of the feelings that it wishes to express. The rhythms and changes of information (texts, sounds and images) are musically measured in order to identify and take the spectator to different states of mind and anguish with a cruelty that is almost physical. With the archive material (the artist’s own as well as found) and his personal treatment of the image, Ruiz de Infante creates a fable about guilt, rites of initiation and maturity, from the perspective of everyday uncanniness.
“Watching this video will not be an easy task.”
Los lobos is a video with which Ruiz de Infante attempts to express his own fears and contradictions, an emotional laying bare that he had already subtly hinted at, in some of his previous projects. “I am also afraid and I also feel impotent when I realise my own cruelty as well as that of others”. (Sins that kill are baggage that is difficult to accept.) This piece is constructed as a process of expiation of guilt. The author himself admits that this is an amoral journey, as he hasn’t wanted to establish clear laws for its structure.
Ruiz de Infante, fascinated by the freedom of children’s perception and expression mechanisms, and by their imprecise use of certain rules that are only intuited, generates a dysfunctional context within which the world of the real is understood along a difficult learning journey through the dark side of the soul. This is a look at the world of childhood characterised by its muddy character, where all laws and prohibitions are perceived as absurd.
Los lobos presents a hallucinatory take on the outside world. A face, an everyday object, a matter... (the objects, the walls, the lights, the shadows, the people...) all suffice to make us feel the uncanny danger that emerges when opening up some paths in the unconscious. The mental trip, the physical one, and even the reading and visual trips are experiences that get mixed up as they accumulate, thereby modifying all sensations. Everything goes fast and we all want it to go even faster. Codes superimpose and change the scenery.
The form of the piece (despite its fragmentation) is based on a classic narrative structure: two characters exchange information: one directs the other in the acquisition of knowledge about some realities of life. We only have to press a button: close our eyes and the room is again filled with the calming buzz of electric fans. As we walk in, and pass through different doors, different stages of this spiral-like videogame are burnt; a videogame without room for quiet breathing, in which, in order to advance up the different stages, all villages must be burnt, women and children killed, everyone must be exterminated.
“... Nobody will guide you in this journey (this is also a lie).”