Even the most princely doll becomes a capable proletarian comrade in the children’s play commune (Walter Benjamin, “Old Toys” 1928) During our childhood, we have all eviscerated a stuffed animal or disemboweled a toy. Baudelaire interpreted this impulse as a “first metaphysical tendency”: the child looks for the soul of his doll, but when he does not find it, sadness or stupor ensues. What Walter Benjamin would reply to the French poet is that the soul […]
The absence of the paternal and maternal figures, or more specifically their physical distance as a child, and the consequent virtual relationship when the technological virtuality did not yet exist has marked, in a sense, the work of María Ruido. In her film essays, however, we could almost say that the feminist motto “the personal is political” is reversed because intimate only appears in her work in an indirect manner, through complex webs that weave the social with the […]
