Hunting Gamusinos is a project that uses the imaginary hunt of the Gamusino as a conceptual framework to explore the idea of rites of passage and hunting practices as transmisors of patriarcal masculine rolls and values. The Gamusino Hunt is a prank used in Spain and Portugal mainly in hunting comunities, where the “victim” (usually a child) is convinced to go hunt gamusinos, an animal that doesn’t exhist.

During the practical joke, which is carried at night, the child is told to be ready to hunt the gamusino, while the hunters make sound in order to attract it. Little by little, the elders move away from the child, leaving them alone in the forest, facing both the fear to the unknown and later, a sense of humiliation mixed with the comradery of being accepted in the group. The main objetive of the work is to use the search for the gamusino, an unobtainable goal, as a metaphor for the quest of traditional male reafirmation, where hunting values serve as a direct transaliton to patriarcal maculine expectations and attitudes resulting in both, possitive and negative consequences in adult males.