Los Cavernícolas [The Cavemen] is a harcore agricultural video-essay about the construction of the rural subject, fictionalized from urban environments as alien to culture or to the production of knowledge. In the short film, Cande Lázaro starts from a confession of an acquaintance, “I don't go to the village anymore because it is full of cavemen”, to investigate tangled and unsolvable issues such as the construction of otherness, extractivist practices or the perversions of the discourse of inclusion, based on the logic of stereotype.

Here, disguise appears as a device that invites to mock the rigidity and essentialisms concerning ruralization and the construction of class, but also racialization. However, this operation is combined with the practice of a radically tender and active listening that invites us not to solve these complexities, but to sustain them. It is precisely this (con)fusion that, accompanied by a poor and amateurish image, makes us uncomfortable with the desire to invite us to practice new ways of narrating and understanding ourselves, in problematic and disturbing relations with both the center and the periphery.

Los Cavernícolas has been produced within the framework of the exhibition “Només si fa olor de terra”, curated by blanca arias in 2024 for La Panera de Lleida.