Although the distinctive feature of Badiola’s work has always been a rich interpretative complexity and the accumulation of signs, this piece adds a further element by being filmed using as framework the various pieces and installations that the Basque artist made in the year 2002 for an exhibition of his work at Barcelona’s MACBA.

The video presents a range of narratives in which different characters interact within a space charged with signifiers and displaying a heavy aesthetic weight. This causes the different stories that take place to acquire relative narrative weight, as we don’t need a plot for these to carry some meaning. Different layers of interpretation are superimposed on the different visual layers, and meanwhile the voice-over develops parallelly to the images, which themselves borrow fragments from other of Badiola’s pieces. Cameras film cameras and signs displace one another, from referents to the art world, all the way to flags, sentences and quotes of visual fragments. All these elements compose the reality of this piece, a work that is both symbolically and conceptually saturated.

The reality that is presented to us is fragmentary, the temporal threads break free in order to rejoin again with one another, and all of this takes place within the framework of a conceptual metastructure that questions all and each of the scenes that we watch. The actors’ subjectivities are displaced by the signs that envelop them. Identity takes the form of something forever changing and contingent. All of the words coming out of the actors’ mouths will be determined by the context, their gestures will always be caught between intention and its possible reading. Badiola here puts together one of his most complex and symbolically rich works. To unravel the narrative that unfolds before us does not guarantee that the piece will be understood, it will rather just offer us one possible way among many others of approaching it.