LOS INDIVIDUOS
collective avec Ash Aravena (Chile), Natalie Boterman (Canada), & Patricio Gil-Flood (Argentina)
www.soundcloud.com/los_individuos
2014-2016
Formed in late 2014, Los Individuos (The Individuals) is an internationally based collective that operates mainly within the public sphere through the use of radio broadcastings, workshops, social gatherings, posters, printed matter, graphic zines, installations and performance based works. Work is ongoing, experimental, and based simultaneously on a local as well as a global scale. The three primary members are Ash Aravena (Chile), Natalie Boterman (Canada), and Patricio Gil-Flood (Argentina.)
The formation of this collective was born spontaneously during the MFA program at Ecole Cantonale d’Arts du Valais (ECAV) in Sierre, Switzerland. With participatory and collaborative practice at the heart of its’ activity, Los Individuos began to enact a series of spontaneous events and happenings within its immediate context. Karaoke nights, and communal dinners – each focused on exchange, sharing, and collectivity – were enacted with a particular kind of “creative drift” in mind, where new modes of practice and inquiry are developed and tested. For each event a poster was created with a theme and event name, and was subsequently disseminated through word of mouth and emails. These events were not recorded in any formal sense; instead each poster serves as a kind of record – adding to a running archive accessed by viewers as much through memory as through imaginative engagements with what might have taken place.
As a part of the 2015 Winter School hosted by ECAV in Sierre, Los Individuos proposed a Radio Show Workshop with the participation of students and faculty from GradCam, Dublin Institute of Technology as well as Sint-Lucas, Antwerp. During this radio show participants and collaborators were encouraged to involve themselves and actively engage with the radio format in whichever way they chose. Content was not monitored, but instead created the series of streams that comprised a larger collective work. The result of this workshop was an ephemeral live 24-hour streamed audio work that featured political and theoretical discussions, interviews, and situational content that ranged from impromptu musical interventions to haircuts. The show was accessible to observers and listeners both within the studio itself as well as over the Internet for its’ full 24 hour duration.
Building on the momentum of this initial workshop project, Los Individuos developed a second iteration entitled Situational Radio. This ongoing project takes advantage of planned travels as a point of departure for exploring different settings as a catalyst for conversations, meetings, or happenstance events. Basel, Zurich, Luzern, Genève, Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, Zermat, Sierre, Haukijärvi and various other global locations have all played hosts of the studio – which is essentially composed of one or more willing participants and a sound recording device, and can therefore can exist anywhere for any period of time however short or long. Additions to the Situational Radio are made through open submissions as well as through content generated by core members – forming an open structure to explore and interpret language by broadcasting different “points of view” on air. These hour-long conversations are hosted on the Los Individuos Sound Cloud account and are a part of the creative commons, and are therefore accessible to anyone globally.
The projects of Los Individuos were built gradually into an archive of creative engagements within a variety of spaces and contexts. The public sphere is treated as material, like a pencil or paper, to be shaped, worked with, and developed in response to its’ social, political, and geographical setting. The basis and continuation of Los Individuos’ practice is centered on malleable and adaptable project formats; premised simultaneously on distance in movement, as well as close engagement with communities and contexts. At the forefront of the collective’s process is the need for projects to remain inclusive, accessible and flexible. While this collective’s process was being built and scaffolded through the mapping of it’s continuing process, its remained open to change and re-evaluation in response to changing contexts and situations.
In the fall of 2016, Los Individuos descended upon Monthey for a period of three months, taking up residence at Monthey Psychiatric Hospital. During this time a new project entitled EPISODE 4: LOS INDIVIDUOS SEARCH FOR ‘THE REST’ was launched. This project expanded upon previous formats of the workshop and radio format by translating audio files into graphic zine posters, printed matter works, public engagement performances, and a final publication in the format of printed matter documents.
