Who Cares About Bullfighting?

Despite signs of waning popularity, bullfighting still exists in the collective imagination as an enduring, if stereotypical, representation of Spanish culture. Through seemingly mundane and banal devices, Elsa Casanova Sampé explores the mechanisms that instrumentalise and fetishize the narratives of this niche spectacle. Who Cares About Bullfighting? is a live-streamed performance on a decontextualised backdrop, deconstructing the gestures, rituals, images and environments making up this practice, in order to unfold the frictions of portraying images as immutably consensual and unified. Even if no one ‘actually’ cares about bullfighting, its romantic aspirational promise expands into current precarious labour conditions that mask and channel similar ideologies.