They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But less than a thousand views. In the face of the continuous torrent of images flooding every corner of the internet, the Serrucho company returns to TNT with a piece that is neither a livestream nor a cabinet of digital curiosities. Instead, as they themselves describe it, it is something more akin to a puppet show. An attempt to reclaim images as things.

One of Serrucho’s hallmarks is dispensing with performers and giving voice to objects. The internet, in contrast, is buzzing with performers: thousands of people are relentlessly sharing what they’re doing live via platforms like TikTok, Twitch and Instagram. From playing video games to staring out the window, the web is teeming with real-time cinematic sequences in which people record themselves as if they were actors. An endless stream of images that, in many cases, nobody ever sees.

Or do they? Perhaps tonight, without knowing it, some of these anonymous performers will take to the stage for a live theatre audience. Perhaps their sudden appearance will change everything. Or perhaps it’s them who will change. In Fogonazo, the overabundance of images gives way to a material poetry that decontextualises visual excess and offers, through humour and uncertainty, a slower gaze. With the same instability as any internet connection, Serrucho invite us to lose ourselves in the infinite reflections between reality and fiction, drawing on one of theatre’s most powerful spells: the one that makes us wonder whether we are imagining what we see, or are seeing it for real.

Searching the nerve of ambiguity at the heart of audiovisual language is one of Serrucho’s goals with this piece, but it’s also part of the same shared fascination with cinema as a means to generate images and fiction that we find in the work of Macarena Recuerda Shepherd (Si fuera una película), Sara Manubens (Symphony of Horror), Marta Azparren (Fasting Girls) and Ça marche (Incendis).