Lobes Salvaxes
Lobes Salvaxes is a situated research project that grows from Alba Casas’ doctoral thesis and takes shape through collaboration with artist Adrián Riveiro. We delve into the imaginary of the wild and the monstrous within Galician culture, through the figure of the wolf and lycanthropy, engaging with a dissident symbology that subverts official history and offers a critical and emancipated perspective in contrast to the norm.
In a time of disciplining bodies and identities, wolves/she-wolves/lycanthropes emerge as a metaphor for necessary disorder. Beings that disobey binary logics of sex and gender, bodies that resist attempts at domestication and control. Their presence becomes a tool to reflect on sexual and gender dissidence in Galicia: a map of violence, but also of resistance.
During our time at the Residencias Paraíso, we sought to build a speculative genealogy—an embodied drift that weaves through theory and anchors itself in oral culture. Through performance, video art, and soundscapes, we imagine new wolfish narratives, opening space for a collective and ever-changing tale between the real and the fantastic.
A multidisciplinary project that inhabits the margins and proposes a new structure of sensitivity: wild, queer, and disobedient.
Alba Casas & Adrian Riveiro
Alba Casas is a multidisciplinary artist and predoctoral researcher based in Galicia, Spain. She was born in As Neves, a small village on the misty border with Portugal. Deeply rooted in the territory, growing up queer in a rural landscape marked by political, social, and geographical boundaries has profoundly shaped her path. Living between limits fueled Alba’s ability to cross disciplines, concepts, and geographies, resulting in a hybrid practice that dissolves traditional boundaries. Her work traces bodies and beings that defy imposed orders within the Galician context, identifying the cracks in hegemonic binary logics to redefine reality. Through the intersection of artistic creation and academic research, she aims to elevate the everyday, shaping new rural spaces, collectives, and solidarity networks. Alba Casas uses audiovisual techniques and installations to capture the environment, honoring its essence while seeking moments of transformation. As a researcher, she has published in journals such as Re-visiones (Ediciones Complutense), Mazarelos, and with Holigráfica Press. Her work has also been presented at national and international conferences on Ibero-American studies and queer dissidence. As an artist, her projects have been exhibited at spaces such as MUA during the IV Biennial of Visual Arts, the Cidade da Cultura in Santiago de Compostela, and the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid.
Adrian Riveiro. Anti-academic and self-taught, he creates visual and sound environments outside of academic circles, contributing to the universalization of contemporary artistic perspectives in areas excluded from conventional art spaces. This approach has led him to create spaces like Os Padrosos, an associative environment that merges video art, immersive rooms, and soundscapes in a rural setting far from urban centers. He works with people not traditionally recognized as artists or musicians, following a vision akin to Art Brut logics, allowing expression free of predefined categories or roles. This line of thought and methodology has given rise to collectives such as Adiós Manuel (which blends electronics with traditional rhythms), –FURADA– (dedicated to renewing national poetry and its authors), and φilevo (a project merging alternative music with contemporary philosophy). Across all of these, special emphasis is placed on the rural backgrounds of their members, recognizing how rooted philosophical discourse can emerge from everyday rural life.