“He plays the music, we dance” is part of the project “Are you who I think you are?”, a photographic project made up of six stories that take place in the city of Madrid. They are unconnected stories that involve humour, the absurd, the eccentric, the everyday and the not so everyday. Told in a light-hearted and humorous tone. The genre, personal relationships, the collective imaginary, popular culture, tradition and the identity of the city come into play. A caricature of the everyday world that surrounds us and how unnoticed its infinite stories go unnoticed.
Delinquent brothers with an air of gangsters dedicate their lives to committing medium-sized robberies throughout their neighborhood. Fantasizing about being protagonists in popular gangster movies they attempt to intimidate their neighbors, often with little success.
Behind that aggressive, even foreboding appearance of his, Benigno could well be a man to be apprehensive and even fearful of, but nothing could be further from the truth. Accompanied at all times by a Doberman that he robbed from the garden of a terraced house as a puppy, between the two of them the dog is probably the one that commands the most respect and is the designated guardian of his territory.
Albeit under a deliberate disguise as the old-school don of the local mob that he defines as “a modern-day Al Capone with a touch of colour”, in reality he is nothing more than a rascally Iberian thug getting on in years, who busies himself with trifles that make him the Godfather no further than his own four walls. Despite this he is the leader of his family gang, where he has stayed afloat for years sustained by small-time jobs and loots that weren’t worth facing a sentence for. This says quite a lot about the quality of the people around him, frequently to be seen barbecuing on the roof of the building while demonstrating their voyeuristic expertise at their neighbours’ expense.
The brothers are about to receive a tip that will take them to Galicia in search of their most succulent loot to date: a large shipment of luxurious French relics. What they do not expect is to end up mistakenly taking a shipment of jugs and all the consequences that this action will lead to.
“Both the characters and the story that is told are products of the imagination.”
These stories are born from a collection of images that are the fruit of my curiosity for street life and arise spontaneously and by chance. It is the images already taken in the streets that later inspire the stories, through a combination that gives rise to stories that flow between eccentricity and picaresque.
