By integrating various artistic disciplines, the visual creation company proposes shows based on sensoriality and creative innovation
Here’s a simple mental exercise: Close your eyes and imagine two painters, a musician, an actress and three video-experimenters working on the same project. Imagine the possibility of creating, for example, new sound and audiovisual atmospheres that wander through the ins and outs of sensorial interaction. Open your eyes. There’s no need to digress any longer: this is exactly what is carried out by Insectotròpics.
Xanu, eeeex, Tullis Reeine, Laia Ribas, VVV, Maria Thorson and Mar Nicolás created the group back in 2011. These insects define themselves as an artistic company of visual exploration. A “magneto-dynamic explosion”, which converges in a space where different arts interact. Through investigation, Insectotròpics proposes a universe where various disciplines meet in a sensorial universe: music, video, theatrical interpretation and pictures. The narration becomes a spiral intent on awakening disparate perceptions.
The group’s formation
Due to technical and creative needs, the group’s formation was by layers. Although the pioneering insects were Laia, María, eeeex (Esteve) and Xanu, it didn’t take long for VVV (Vicenç) to join the group. The project’s vocation for expansion incited as well the entrance of the group’s two lacking disciplines: music, under Tullis’ control, and interpretation, with Mar’s integration in the team.
Their way of working is peculiar, due to the groups being formed by numerous components. Insectotròpics works on two different levels: the first is based on the concreting proposals to feed the script –a group of friends and some glasses of wine aid in giving inspiration a swift arrival-; the second answers to a more technical dimension with live rehearses of the proposals. But, despite everything, the high number of components doesn’t prove a problem for the group: “a creative life together forces us to constantly update our level of socialisation, but we aren’t people, we’re marvellous psychotropic insects with smiles from ear to ear”, explains Xanu.
Little Red Riding Hood
The creative possibilities of such a big artistic proposal made the group delimit the concept in a specific story-line which allows them to experiment to the limit with all the different languages they conjugate. It was Maria’s idea to reinterpret the well-known Little Red Riding Hood story in an unconventional way.
- Foto: Quim Vives .
The brothers Grimm’s tale appears in La Caputxeta Galàctica (The Galactic Riding Hood) as a more distorted, dark and diluted version. “The story had some great possibilities as an initiation journey for liberation and paradigmatic change”, we are told. Projections of the big bad wolf, disturbing music and hallucinations of a slightly more well-developed Little Red Riding Hood than the original. MiRA! festival already took on this representation in its last edition (Fabra i Coats, 2011), but the project’s sails are still gathering wind.
Micropatronage as a form of finance
Despite Insectotròpics’ unquestionable creativity, art also needs new financing paths. For that reason, the company launched a scarce few weeks ago their own Verkami. Through this platform –something like an equivalent of patrons, reinvented in the XXI Century-, the group intends to obtain enough contributions to finance the project and be able to work more comfortable and efficiently. The idea doesn’t end here. In exchange for these contributions, the exponential patrons receive a great amount of gifts and facilities which they wouldn’t be able to obtain in any other way. The project La Caputxeta Galàctica in Verkami will remain open until the 19th of March and, for now, the results move with full speed ahead.
Ana Ramírez