León & Cociña 1980

Lives in Santiago de Chile. Works in Santiago de Chile.

Represented by:

Upstream Gallery

Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña (both 1980, Chile) have been working together since 2007. They were educated at the Universidad Católica, Santiago de Chile. León also studied at UDK (Berlin) and De Ateliers (Amsterdam). With their experimental films, Leon and Cociña create a new interpretation of the religious symbolism and magical rituals that are deeply rooted in the traditional culture of Latin America. For the production of their films they combine different techniques such as photography, drawing, sculpture, dance and performance.

An unpolished cinematographic language characterizes the stop-motion films of León and Cociña. The papier mâché figures and innocent-looking drawings strongly contrast with the heavy topics such as religion, sex and death the films deal with.

León and Cociña won several awards and their films are selected regularly for international film festivals. Their work is frequently exhibited in museums and biennials in Latin America, but it has also been presented at venues such as the Whitechapel Gallery, the Guggenheim, KW Berlin, the Venice Biennial 2013 and Art Basel Statements 2012 with Upstream Gallery. Their first full-length film 'La Casa Lobo' premiered at the 68th Berlinale in 2018, where it was awarded the Caligari Film Prize.

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Artworks by León & Cociña

Articles on León & Cociña

An imaginative reflection on a dark history

In the 'Burials' exhibition at Upstream Gallery, we see how the Chilean artist duo León en Cociña uses fantasy to rewrite a dark chapter from the past.

Flor Linckens

Media

The Hyperboreans (2024) trailer

Highlights

La Casa Lobo

2018

About

Article about La Casa Lobo in the New York Times

In the stop-motion animated film “La Casa Lobo” (The Wolf House), a young woman emerges from the walls and melts into the floor, paintings cry, a tree grows in a living room and pigs transform into children. The Chilean artists Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña created each image of their visually stunning and horrifying film using life-size models and sets that are in a constant state of evolution. To do so, they set up temporary studios within art gallery spaces and museums from Chile to Amsterdam, creating the film with art aficionados as their witnesses. Now the finished work will receive another art-world screening at Art Basel Miami Beach, as Upstream Gallery from Amsterdam presents the work in the “Positions” section, with an exhibition entirely devoted to this single work by Mr. León and Mr. Cociña.

Nina Siegal

Review of La Casa Lobo in The Hollywood Reporter

It’s commonplace that folk and fairy tales have their dark sides, but they don’t come much darker than in The Wolf House. Fusing Grimm, the early shorts of David Lynch and the stop-motion work of Jan Svankmajer into a visually engrossing, reference-rich and disturbing tale about the mental delirium of a young girl, the deeply uncanny pic makes for an unsettling viewing experience, a creative tour de force whose endlessly fascinating visuals are deliberately seductive and repellent in equal measure.

Jonathan Holland

Review of the exhibition Offspring 2011 at the Ateliers in NRC

Also the Chilean artist Cristóbal Léon comes as out of nowhere with his remarkable, fifteen minute lasting film El Templo. Cristóbal created a magical-realistic primordial story in which human beings and puppets, men and women lose themselves and merge into each other. Just like the writers Martin Amis and Kurt Vonnegut, Cristóbal is fascinated by history and its course. Cristóbal too, turns around this course and directs the arrow not at the end but at the beginning. Successfully.

Lucette ter Borg

Review of the exhibtion Bones at Upstream Gallery in Het Parool

It feels as if the puppets, paintings and videos from the Chilean duo Cristóbal León and Joaquin Cociña all originate from the same dark fairytale world. (…) You can’t help but feel a deep admiration for their intensive working process. The artists started this fairytale in 2013, and this year the feature film comes out. Perhaps then the mysterious scenes will fall into place in a narrative, but hopefully it stays just as interesting as a whole.”