rED HumaNa

Red Humana, Naguel Rivero's experiment unites 11 diverse individuals in Cordoba, Argentina, transcending societal rifts. Blending performers with non-artists, it explores empathy's social role, fostering honest connections amid political complexities.

Red Humana is an experimental project that is produced from a hypothesis by the artist Naguel Rivero, where the nature of empathy and its social role are questioned. Without direction and based on minimal instructions (select and group strangers), the author brings together a group of 11 people between 20 and 70 years old who form a spontaneous link, without there being an initial connection between them.

Four people from this group work with their bodies as performers. The other seven people had no experience with projects of this type: they were recruited from the streets, had no relationship with art and had never worked in disciplines that used the body in a performative way.

They came from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and professions, thus mixing artists with "common people."

The meeting of this group gave rise to a fluid choreography, achieved thanks to listening to how bodies manifest themselves, connected regardless of heterogeneities and building a new collective body from empathy.

In the author's words: “These trust exercises were filmed in real time. I adapted to the way bodies communicated without intervening or directing; I used analog photography and recorded video, I filmed using a slow cinema technique, where the camera observes what is happening without the need for sensationalism or manipulation. I was filming, but my gaze was more that of an observer than that of a director.

This went beyond something aesthetic: I sensed a feeling of honest connection between disparate people, and perhaps between me and the country where I come from.”

This project was carried out entirely in Córdoba, in the heart of Argentina: a country in which recent political and economic disturbances mean that society is experiencing a complex moment.

Red Humana is presented as a sensitive response to the famous “rift” that divides the people to subdue them from competing political ideologies.

Red Humana aims to be a documentary series that collects images of a truth that the mass media does not tell.

The neighborhood where it was filmed is the neighborhood where the artist was born and lived until he was 18 years old.

Naguel Rivero, 2024.