Sueño Perro: Instalación Celuloide de Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Fondazione Prada
September 18, 2025–February 25, 2026
Milan
The photographer Stephen Shore once famously remarked that if you are going to take a picture, put a car in it. Cars are a cultural time stamp, an economic barometer, but also, in the film Amores Perros, the center of the universe. Cars and their intersection are where timelines collide, chance and necessity intersect, plans are overturned, and destinies are rewritten. A car crash stands at the center of the vast and elaborate re-presentation of the groundbreaking film by director Alejandro González Iñárritu, staged by the director himself at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. Twenty-five years after the film was released in 2000—and according to many critics inaugurated the so-called Mexican new wave in cinema—Iñárritu felt compelled to revisit the million feet of film archived at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, including tests, outtakes, and even extra video footage shot by his crew. As he describes it, plunging back into that mass of fragments was a truly mind-bending experience, a confrontation not merely with his own past work but with the dozens or even hundreds of films that might have been.
But now they are—or at least the suggestion of them. In six rooms at Prada, Iñárritu arranged anywhere from one to three 35-millimeter film projectors, running footage he had spliced together and given new soundtracks, often ambient or other soundscapes. Each of the rooms focus on a different scene or set of scenes and their variants. Angles change, points of view change, cutting and sequencing change, repetitions change. If this sounds like an academic exercise for cinephiles, its presentation in an art museum signals something else. It takes its place alongside probing art-world examinations of cinema that include Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993) and Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010). What emerges at Prada is independent of the released film (and yet not): a labyrinthine examination of time, narrative, memory, and the unconscious, whose impact is very different (and yet not) from its finished relative.
To understand what happens at Prada—and the other venues the exhibition will visit—a brief refresher on Amores Perros is in order. The film tells three interconnecting stories of characters from various strata of Mexican society: the tension between two brothers—the older, Ramiro, a stickup artist, the younger, Octavio, making money at dogfights—over the affections of a young woman, Susana, married to Ramiro and the mother of his child; the decline of a fashion model after an accident derails her career; and the stalking of a businessman by a hitman, who is both a vagrant and an ex-guerilla. All three stories come together at the scene of the accident, in a sequence that begins the film and recurs throughout. Violence runs through the stories like the line running through a dollar sign. In this Mexico, money—too much or not enough to live on—corrupts, and the only way out of it, Iñárritu suggests, is to do what the vagrant assassin does at the end of the film after renouncing the job he has been hired to do: give the money away and just keep walking, without hope or expectation.
When the film debuted, it was compared with the work of Quentin Tarantino, but its violence is not stylized,.Its colors are grainy and raw, not pop, and its vision—given the horrors that were to unfold in Mexico over the next two decades—seems the opposite of exaggerated: prescient. Iñárritu’s world, elaborated in Amores Perros and subsequent films such as 21 Grams and Babel, is one of unintended consequences and ripple effects, in which fate is disguised as coincidence and character as accident.
At Prada, it is as if the director blew up his own world in order to meditate on the fragments. Gone are the connecting plots and original soundtrack. The characters appear unintroduced in the middle of whatever action, and that action is played over and over, often from different points of view. Many of the clips are introduced by a clapboard, from which we learn that the film’s shooting title was Amor y Rabia [Love and Rage]. This never lets us forget that what we are seeing is a constructed reality, with many versions, in some sense all of them provisional. These include the ones we put together in our heads from room-to-room, and what we might remember from having seen the finished film. Particular comparisons are too numerous and intricate to spell out, and all of them are fascinating. That said, some are revelatory, but in different ways.