Lucía, 2007. 3’50” / Luis, 2008. 3’50”. De la serie Lucía, Luis y el lobo.
Fundación Proa, Argentina (www.proa.org)
In this edition, Proa selected the series of videos Lucía, Luis y el lobo (Lucía, Luis and the wolf), produced by artists Niles Atallah, Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León. The originality of their work results from the combination of a literary narrative, voice-over, images from childhood memories and fear of the night, all exceptionally accomplished. This new and creative production contains a universe of images, words and sounds that rock its spectator to the core.
The following text, written by Daniel Reyes León, accounts for the magnitude of Lucía, Luis y el lobo:
A story that seems to tell itself, but that ultimately transmits a relationship between time and fear, between childish disguises and bare nakedness in the face of great facts, developed through three audiovisual moments integrated into a controlled disaster. The installation “Lucía, Luís y El Lobo”, created by the trio from Diluvio Lab, Niles Atalha, Joaquín Cociña y Cristóbal León in the Animal Gallery, a piece that could function perfectly well in high definition cinemas or other spaces exclusively destined to be used for viewing films, is flanked by the precision – less precise every time – of a space controlled by the powers of visual art.
“Lucía, Luís y el Lobo” may seem like a horror story, but it is not; rather, it is a suspense narrative told through stop motion animation and careful acoustic and scenographic work, based on object recognition of the elements used in the video. This is what separates the animations “Lucia” y “Luis” from the realm of pure film, situating them instead in a territory of object recognition that displays the selection process involved in art direction, and at the same time conceals the extensive labor behind the over six minutes of animation that comprise the story in the video. It is to be precise, rather than to conceal, that they divert attention from the technical impeccability towards the construction of a recognizable place from its disastrous constitution.
If the space of the cinema has made us accustomed to seats, carpets, and lights -- despite antique cinemas that, in their deterioration, maintain an aseptic line for viewing a film – the viewing proposed in this exhibit presents the principle projection intermingled with the multiple screens as an impossible furnishing. The trajectory and recognition of the objects in the installation, beyond fusing the technology of the screens and the projections with dirt and wood, constitute a restaging of the elements used in the audiovisual pieces. Like when they carry a defendant to the scene of the crime in order to recreate the crime. Time, which is sculpted and manipulated through narrative in the stop motions, is open to the times of the route and recognition of the installation, emphasizing the optimization of the resources with which the audiovisual pieces were constructed. The stop motion, imputed, does not have to go to the recognition of Svankmajer or of the brothers Quay, but of their scenographic fingerprints.
The screen is not alone and thus time is hidden from us. Time is constructed photo by photo and is reduced to the story of Lucia and Luis, children who live in a place built on acceleration and fear, on what is heard and told. Children who are drawn on walls and who inhabit a space that deteriorates in the light of their voices off stage; who tell us a simple story, a story in bits and pieces, as though it were a story that we caught in the middle, after it had begun, and that tends to get diluted in those perverse details of the overly specific. The installation does not try to be realistic, to imitate how children talk, nor to imitate childhood under its classical film archetypes, but to develop particular characters that are witnesses to a synthetic time, that speak about those lost minutes between one photo and the next without needing to manifest the nostalgia or the narrative of Proust as an antecedent. They are obvious stories, direct, where colloquialism triumphs over protocol, where fear and humor are as powerful as the image.
However, the scenery carries us towards disaster, to that which is commonly denominated as “disorder”, the space inhabited by phantoms of modern rationality. More than once we’ve said something like “do not disorder my disorder, because I understand it”. As in Art where there is very little left to understand, this installation uses elements of everyday technology to tell a story, and it does so following the previously stated maxim: “do not disorder my disorder, because I understand it”. Everything seems to have its own place, each story seems to have no connection to the next, yet the three parallel elements converge into a single perverse utilization of the childish imagination as an excuse to escape from the professional deformations of our local artistic “sphere”. The wolf, the space, Lucia and Luis; stories of acceleration and fear.
Awards: The series Lucía, Luis, y el lobo was previewed at many international festivals and received several awards such as: 1st Prize, Best International Film, Fantoche International Animation Film Festival, Baden, Switzerland; Grand Prix Wooden Wolf Prize, Animated Dreams, Animation Film Festival, Tallinn, Estonia; Grand Jury Prize for Best Short Film, FIBABC (Festival Iberoamericano de Cortometrajes ABC), Madrid, Spain (2009); Special Mention Jury Prize, 16º Valdivia International Film Festival, Valdivia, Chile (2009); Literaturwerkstatt Berlin Prize, Zebra Poetry Film Festival Berlín (2008); and 2nd Place Award, Fair Play Film and Video Award Festival, Lugano, Switzerland. (2008). Luis was exhibited at Guggenheim Museum, New York, as one of the winners of the YouTube Play Guggenheim, Biennial of Creative Video (2010).