Throughout April 2016, participants of La rara troupe filmed our daily lives. After the filming days, we met to try and find a common ground into which edit all the footage in a collaborative way. This common ground might be a shared diary or even a rain notepad. We are still looking.
Alfredo Aracil, curator and researcher, wrote the following text after the film presentation on LAAV_16 meetings: What it mean to be normal?:
It is not common for us cultural producers to find spaces where to share our beliefs, which often are far apart from the social reality we are in. Nor it is common to find art collectives that work as such, even though concepts such as author or art work have been called into question since many decades ago. In La rara troupe one can perceive the two most interesting attitudes that can be found in contemporary art. On the one hand, the collective process of their work is an end in itself. The process and the ways of proceeding are as important as what results from them. On the other hand we found their political attitude. This attitude answer the question that ultimately every producer must answer: how to offer models of coexistence more than just reflecting on the ways we can live together. Some texts defined this position as a political-aesthetical one, which would mean a renegotiation of our usual position as producers: that of leading the way in favour of the dominant direction.
Just the title of the session on Thursday the 24th What it means to be normal? constitutes an invitation to think on which ways we are as different as we are equal to each other. Moreover, this means that we can claim with dignity that we are on our right to enjoy being the other, which surpasses the violence of a language that makes from words such as abnormal or different a powerful tool of mass control. What unusual days works on these concepts of language and uses of it to create a coral narration that does not elude talking about the tougher aspects of mental health. This does not mean that the film falls into a melancholic narrative or even into being political in the easy way. On the contrary, in each scene we can observe vitalism, fascination for the world, an eager to learn, which perfectly represents what it is La rara toupe.