La humana perfecta

La Rara Troupe (León, 2012) is a creative group that has been exploring mental health through audiovisual creation since 2012. Variable in size and in the diverse identities of its members, each work season is unique and irreplaceable, forging methods that promote creation far from traditional notions of authorship and market dynamics, and closer to concepts of collaborative learning and social agency for people often excluded from cultural production processes.

Between October 2017 and June 2018 we reflected on the concepts of body and emotional-sexual diversity and on the multiple intersections that occur with mental health. We started with viewing and reading sessions related to the topic to collectively find a perspective from which to approach the audiovisual piece. After watching the short film The perfect human (1967) by Jorgen Leth, the idea arose of recreating it shot by shot, replacing the pair of perfect actors from the original work with the diverse and real bodies of the people who make up the collective. We used a camera and lighting equipment from LAAV_ (Laboratory of Experimental Audiovisual Anthropology), which was mainly operated by members of the collective who have more experience in video recording. The interpretation was collective, with anyone improvising in front of the camera at any given moment, following the plan set by a monitor that reproduced each shot of the original short. The filming took place in three sessions at the MUSAC, a center that served as the collective's headquarters.