1. For some time I have been trying to enter the obscure regions of childhood fears, the halucinatory vision of the external (objects, walls, light, shadow, people), to achieve a state of observation where there are no laws, to see and hear without laws.

2. In The wolves, the past, the present, the future, movement, immobility, darkness, the rewards, punishments, forebodings, order, disorder, doubts...evrything is interchangeable; everything is superimposed in order to analize the possible prey of the external (the young, the speed of time, the shrill noises, the objects, the walls, lights, shadows, people, sick animals...)

3. The Wolves has been constructed as you would construct a place, in which I’ve tried to enter into a state of observation from which to create viewpoints for the shot: a face, an everyday object, materials...are sufficient elements for feeling the strange danger born of opening some roads of the subconscious.

4. We´ve entered the society of continual zapping. Everything moves fast and we all want it to go even faster. Codes are superimposed to change the scenery. Just push a button: close your eyes.

5. We´ve entered an era of interchangeable arms. Raise one, then raise the other! Nothing is too important. Eat, drink, laugh, relate to people to feel that you exist. Go in, go through different doors, burning screens; burning stages of this spiralling videogame with no easy bretahing. If you accept the game, it may be too late.

6. Entering the murky territory of childhood fears is a regressive journey of internal analysis. We´ve all lived there; hidden there are also strange seeds loaded with disturbing impulses.

7. I hardly have time to turn off the window when I go to bed. My machines work in the dark. Only when there´s a big storm do I shakily turn off the hard drive. When a new sun appears on the horizon (it doesn´t matter if it´s real or false,) the room is ruled again by the calming hum of the fans.

8. The full moon of new and old bombs lights my way through art and life. I, too, am a wolf as I regard this fascinating moon. In this cruel safari I have seen the moisture sticking to the skin (sweat, tears, fog, own´s own drool, others´ saliva...) coverts us into perfect targets for electrocution. Some time ago dense smoke announced the great fire: the fire in the kiosks of the daily press.

9. Someone, in the latest screenings I´ve held of this unfinished work, saw this video as a chronicle of the present day (the present as timeless as all the other presents past); saw that the nervous terror emanating from it was familiar. I felt a strange internal contradiction on hearing their words. All their questions were aimed at the possible futility of opening Pandora´s boxes (...)

10. My hope was that The Wolves be seen as a portrait of a wild animal that bites, eats and is eaten. A particular savage which has lost its nobility, simply developing, with all the weapons of intelligence, its cruelest part. (Evidently, I can´t tell what comes across from the screen.)

11. Lately, I´ve learned to play at field self-sufficiency (times of war). Learning how to create images, edit images, to create sounds, shrill and creaking sounds. All of today´s destruction is a Dolby sound spectacle; the sound in this video should be heard at full volume.

12. STRUCTURES FOR A MULTIPLE PERSONALITY (questions regarding a vision of a hopelessly schizophrenic world) -I wanted the form (in spite of its fragmentation) to hinge on a classic recourse of narration: to people trade information; one of them guides the other in learning about some realities. -In an effort to direct the video into subconcious territories, I quickly decided to accept the fact that the two main characters were multiple personalities.. With these tools it was easy to visit ubiquitous lands of possession, of doubling...; here the question of who´s who loses meaning. More than twenty different voices make up the portrayal of these two characters: adult voices, childhood voices, masculine, feminine, animal... that speak different languages to create states of confusion, to begin a road constructed in secret terrains). I know this will make it hard for the spectator to differentiate the characters, they can hardly understand the use of “you” and “I” in the text. Who is the “I” of the seductive and unnerving voice? Who is the “you” who always has to put up with the demanding tone? (Perhaps the issue of “who´s who” has begun to lose meaning in the times we live in. Jackets are reversable, masks are handed out at school.) -I didn´t want this work (between a whisper and a scream) to be presented as direct discourse, the seduction of the lie has been both motor and brake in complicating things. Entering into the construction of a world of traps has made everything tangled (references..., double, triple meanings...) The false guide, I would say, will open doors for us. He will push us toward the interior of the piece so that we try to discern what lies at the end of the tunnels he leads us through. He will go on offering us the possibility of becoming guides ourselves in a world formed like a video game, in which to move through levels, it´s necessary to advance, burn down all the villages, smash, forget,...conquer.

13. Watching this video is no easy task. I´ve never pretended that my work be a party game, but in The Wolves I´ve tried to make the cruelty toward the spectator almost physical. To do this I´ve been obliged to sign a pact with violence. This violence, within the narration of the piece, at times appears in an irrational and gratuitous way, in an attempt to make visible a great, discomforting fascination.

14. I haven´t been able to approach that extreme cruelty offered by our realities. The events we live day to day: close by (relationships, the multiplication of police surveillance, the hardly repressed urges to dominate...) or from afar (the constant bombardment of “terribly real fictions” we see on the news). I know, after this journey, that I haven´t been been able to catch all of the prey I sought at first. Nevertheless, its disquieting smell of sweat is familiar to me. I hope it will be familiar to others to create a ground for dialogues.

Francisco Ruiz de Infante. Octubre 1995.

Los Lobos