Caminata Nocturna Screening @ Kunstnernes Hus Oslo

   One Night Only Gallery. Wergelandsveien 17. 0167 Oslo. Norway

Karl Ingar Røys’ Caminata Nocturna documents both the flight and pursuit of illegal economic migrants across the Mexico-U.S border.
Or at least that’s what it initially appears to document.

Røys’ art practice uses the very falseness of the tourist Caminata as a critical tool. Rather than attempt the impossible task of representing the real of repressive migratory politics Røys twists an already given facsimile into something more disruptive. There’s a certain risk attached to this since this disruption-necessarily contained within the work and within the gallery- always threatens to itself become a spectacular reflection. This is avoided through the doubling of the equivocation between real/ unreal, via blankly representing the chase and capture in a rush of almost real time images, hence both bringing to light and cutting through the primary indistinction of the hyper-mediated spectacle the tourist experience is an element within. Røys constructs a narrative of chase and capture in Caminata Nocturna that in presenting itself as cinema verite documentary plays with it’s own status as the fiction of a fiction.
Text excerpts John Cunningham, London


Thanks to Matthias Kispert, postproduction sound


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In the ONO exhibition space

PETER MOHALL - If the bar ain’t bending you’re just pretending