Ambush #8: Francesc Ruiz

For Ambush #8, Francesc Ruiz proposes a traveling laboratory that overflows the immediate surroundings of Eina Bosc to incorporate the movements, infrastructure, and social machinery of the city. Stemming from his interest in comics as a narrative technology and in highlighting the mechanisms that construct individual and collective realities, Traveling Ferrocatas is conceived as a workshop on kinetic drawing and speculation on the urban imaginary, culminating in the distribution of a free publication in the public space of the railway. Ruiz's project thus explores the experience of train travel as a kaleidoscope of viewpoints, planes, framing, perspectives, and temporalities, employing film formats such as the graphic novel and the storyboard. The graphic format and its dissemination in a publication allows the Ambush #8 to also explore the idea of ​​mobility linked to the printed object, its multiple materialities, and its transportable scale. The print run of 2,000 copies is given out as if it were a free newspaper, highlighting the functions of public transport and the train as places for incidental reading and dissemination of information. The newspaper is distributed on the S1 and S2 lines of the Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat (Catalan Railways) during the first days of autumn 2023.

Francesc Ruiz (Barcelona 1971) starts from the comic as an aesthetic, narrative and intellectual substratum and also as historical and operative material, applied as a continent or description of reality. Through creation, alteration, restitution or coupling, among other ways, he generates possible stories that reveal the gears through which individual and social identities, sexual identity and the identity of the city are constructed. His installations have been shown in different national and international art centres and museums: CA2M (Madrid), EACC (Castelló), MACBA (Barcelona), Gasworks (London), FRAC PACA (Marseille), Weserburg Museum (Bremen) and at biennials such as Venice in 2015, Götteborg in 2017, the Momentum Biennial, Moss, Norway in 2019 and the Busan Biennial in 2020.