METABOLISMO is an animated video essay about the Altamira cave and its many bodies. Both its actual spaces and the bodies it hosts within them. In the film, the cave’s senile ecosystem bearing paleolithic paintings, and the human-made ecosystem that is the museum charged with preserving them, are seen as communicating vessels, whose metabolic mechanisms interfere with each other, constantly re-dissecting the distance between nature and culture. 

Fascinated by the secret life of the agents inhabiting the cave, the bacteria attached to the paintings, the fungi, the insects, and the water that drips inside, the film depicts these infinitely adaptive underrepresented actors of the story as a metabolic life-sustaining chemical process. 

Seeing both the Altamira cave and the Neocueva facsimile as a reflection of the agents acting upon them, be that the scientific community, the visitors, or the bacteria, METABOLISMO is a portrait of ecotones, thresholds from one biome to another, joined by fiction, separated by urgency and protocols.