Ignacio Navas

KICKFLIP is an interactive project —similar to a visual novel or a walking simulator video game— built from recent photographs, found documents, vernacular images, and audio recordings. It gathers the testimonies of a group of people whose teenage years revolved around a skatepark in Tudela, a small town in northern Spain, during the 2000s. The work is presented as an audiovisual installation that can take different forms depending on the exhibition space. Through a nonlinear interactive structure and a node-based navigation system, viewers can wander through the skatepark, uncovering narrative threads that form a collective portrait of small-town youth communities marked by social stigma, restoring complexity to lives often reduced to labels such as “problematic” or “deviant.” Through the voices of its protagonists, KICKFLIP looks back on adolescence from the present, revisiting experiences of friendship, desire, vulnerability, risk, and subcultural belonging, while reflecting on academic failure, school dropout, substance use, sexuality, gender expectations, the social scripts imposed on youth, and the consequences of those experiences. Skateboarding becomes an excuse to talk about everything else. The public skatepark emerges as a space of belonging where forms of identity and self-definition took shape outside the institutional frameworks of school, work, and family, while also becoming an emotional landscape marked by affective memory, contradictions, silences, and shared experiences. In this way, KICKFLIP aims to challenge how youth communities outside dominant social frameworks are remembered, judged, and narrated.