Antonio Llamas y Lucas G. Torralbo

No matter what their ideology or position, no one can watch a policeman on the street for all that long.

‘The Coming Insurrection’ is a project that imagines policemen in their down time, guarding facades, corners, vacant lots and parks in a deserted European city where something seems either to have happened or to be about to happen. As if we could closely observe the periphery of a police operation in an inhospitable urban territory, 'The Coming Insurrection' is a project that distances itself from the classicism of thrillers and action movies to explore the pause, the moments of tedium when the security forces are waiting to go to work. During this down time, there may perhaps be space and freedom to reflect on the raison d'être of security and state control, and perhaps the police themselves may even forget what it is they are guarding.

This project stems from the intention to question the social order and the institutionalised and legitimised force that represents it and for which the figure of the police and their day-to-day activities become a metaphor. Their image is always built on action-packed acts of heroism or on condescension and empathy with stories of tormented men and women who, in spite of everything, supposedly uphold the struggle against evil. This ultimately leads to a romantic idea of policing that continues to render invisible the day-to-day routine of authority as a tool and mechanism.

‘The Coming Insurrection’ is a dual project: a short fiction film and a video installation, the outcome of a work of collective thought and imagination on the exercise of uniformed power in a system and in a current time of permanent crisis in which everything always seems to be about to explode, but never quite does so.

L'esprit de l'escalier is a French expression that refers to that moment when, after a heated argument, you’re on your way out and the perfect riposte comes to mind, the witty remark that would have allowed you to emerge from the conflict with flying colours. The ghost of things left unsaid.

In the winter of 2014, Antonio Llamas (1992, Madrid) and Lucas G. Torralbo (1993, Madrid) set up the film collective ‘espírituescalera’ with the intention of exploring and encountering the possibilities and the apparent limits of the sound image in movement.

Their works have travelled to numerous international film festivals and have also been exhibited at several Biennials and in such spaces as MATADERO or La Fábrica de Armas in Oviedo, among others.

They co-founded CARNICERÍA, a creative space that they share with other film collectives and colleagues from other creative disciplines.

They are currently also working on their first feature film, a work of fiction called LAGOON (LAGUNA).