TRIBU

After investigating the fear of social exclusion in F.O.M.O., there arose the desire to delve into the subject of social connections from a very different angle: our tribal nature. Thus, we have reformulated the questions that guided F.O.M.O.: What causes our inability to truly connect with the world and those around us? And from a contrary perspective we have questioned ourselves: What benefits does belonging to a group have in our lives? Where does the need to be part of it come from? What instincts are activated in us when we feel part of a group?

The deeper we delved into the bond of social belonging from an anthropological perspective, the more the field of research broadened. By studying our past as primates, we discovered how our early ancestors had to adapt to a life of sedentary hunters and how this fact marked our evolutionary development. To survive as a species, we had to root our ties with the tribe and become highly co-operative social animals. This has had a full impact on our development at all levels – from our sexuality and affective world to our intellectual and biological development. Taking into account that genetic mutations occur every 25,000 years, our genetic material is the same as that of those primates, so it seemed especially interesting to explore how this nature manifests itself in us today and, above all, how we live with our primate instincts in modern society.

Synopsis

From an ordinary situation, in which a group of individuals gather together to eat and drink, a pact is generated between all of them (without mentioning it, without consciously talking about it), a slow deconstruction of their customs and language, a ‘return’ of their whole being to a primal and essential state. This journey is guided and limited by the four sides of a rectangle converted into a ‘sacred space’, an appropriate place to communion. As there is an approach of bodies to this space, the usual codes of conduct, mobility and expression are replaced, little by little, by a new and old convention simultaneously, by a memory of other times and other modes of seeing the ‘other’.
Tribu is a rite; it is the invocation and the manifestation of a flow of energy, it is a collective longing for connection.