'Lolo & Sosaku' The Western Archive

Lolo & Sosaku are two sound artists, from Argentina and Japan, who have been collaborating in Barcelona since 2004. With a combination of self-made instruments and cheeky contraptions, they create sound sculptures: machines and installations whose mechanical, repetitive noises can madden or enchant. They take the 'automatism' of art to new extremes.

Director Sergio Caballero (whose debut feature, Finisterrae, won the 2011 Tiger Award) turns the two artists into the atypical heroes of a surreal Western filled with gorgeous landscapes and absurdist humour. Attired in cowboy hats, the duo roams the desert in search of objects and tools – executing compulsive actions with them or arranging them in strange combinations.  

'Lolo & Sosaku' The Western Archive offers a curious reinterpretation of the Western genre by mixing it with slow cinema and art documentary. From time to time, the action is interrupted, the landscape changes and we are presented with snippets of a sound installation in its usual exhibition spaces. This flow between the fiction and the artistic object invites us to see the film as a portrait of the artists’ mental landscape, or even as an allegory of their creative process.

– Cristina Álvarez López

Lolo and Sosaku will be at IFFR for their live performance The End, which serves as the climactic conclusion to the film.