Affenpinshers is a hardcore metal band. Their video Sharks follows a modern individual forced to turn into a shark to survive among sharks. Told in the first person, the story adopts the character’s point of view, revealing his weaknesses as well as his ambitions.

The graphic treatment extends this idea by turning the band into a company. “Affenpinshers & Co.” is given a corporate identity: classical capitals, a seal, a barcode, classification marks. Over the footage, two men in suits under a blue sky, a fake contract appears: the Framework Agreement on Visual and Auditory Submersion (Accord cadre de submersion visuelle et auditive). Its articles split the roles of the production (artistic authority, supervision, visual police, acoustic audit) in redacted legal language.

Against this bureaucracy, the title Sharks is a living letterform: a splattered, grainy calligraphy that bites into the image and spills out of the frame, like the beast beneath the suit. Printed in black and white and pasted in the street, it extends the contrast between the order of paperwork and the violence running through it.