Lola Gonzàlez (b. 1988, Angoulême) is a French artist working mainly with film. Her departure point is often the same: four, ten, or sometimes more people, are secluded from the cities. Impossible to know who they are or what binds them together. Are they fugitives or utopians? Yet, understanding where their actions lead is almost irrelevant, rather one is invited to examine the process and experience of learning to live together and of learning to struggle against an invisible threat. In portraying the same group of people, often in a same location — her parents’ house in the region of Charente, France that itself becomes a character — her practice reflects the complicity with her friends and members of her family who improvise as actors, emphasizing the formation of a community, friendship or collective action as positionality. Gonzàlez explains, “We’ve grown accustomed to a neutral concept of friendship as a form of fondness without consequence whereas all affinity is in fact a bond within a common truth.” Nurtured by the emotional ties that animate her community, Gonzàlez’s search for a common truth embodies a new, chosen version of a reality whereby the deadly injunction to “get real” is indeed tirelessly fought.
