We Would Strike!: Beyond Representation in a Post-Industrial Town.

Arturo Delgado Pereira

On 30 July 1984, 11 mercury miners locked down in the mines of Almadén (Ciudad Real, southern Spain) to protest against their precarious economic and social conditions. 650 metres deep inside the oldest and most productive mercury mines in world history, the miners endured the dark and contaminated galleries for 11 days and nights until their claims were addressed. As an emigrated local filmmaker, I come back to post-industrial Almadén in 2019 to make a documentary film about the mining strike. The premise is to find young locals willing to live inside the now-closed mines for 11 whole days in homage to the older miners and to recreate the experience of 1984, 35 years later. Apart from engaging our collective mining past, performing the form and duration of a previous workers strike, Encierro proposes the underground as a living and symbolic space to foster a series of conversations, encounters, and social and political propositions to reimagine Almadén, which rose from a mine shaft more than 2000 years ago, as ‘something else besides’ a mining town. This exposition explores the potential of documentary film fieldwork to take on a different relationship to normal life that the same or similar events would have as ‘untransformed reality’ – a strike versus the reenactment of a strike – and its potential for activism and social transformation. I will also explore the use of the conditional tense in documentary; a speculative and hypothetical approach to reality sensitive to the ‘potentially’ real, the ‘possible’, and the ‘what if’ as modes of documentation. What happens when the forms of ‘documentary’ and ‘reenactment’ are exceeded, and act upon the world rather than only represent it?

In this clip, from Pablo’s Winter (Chico Pereira, 2012), we see Pablo Marjalizo, one of the 11 striking miners of 1984. Pablo represents the last generation of mercury miners, and their strike in 1984 the last remarkable workers’ protest in Almadén until the closure of the mines in 2003.

Etymologically, Almadén means ‘The Mine’.^[6] Nowadays, Almadén is a ‘mine without a mine’, or at least, without a mine functioning as such. The end of mining represents for Almadén what TJ Demos has defined as the end of a world: a world being based on certain lifeways established over generations, manners of knowing and being, cosmologies, modes of habitation, modes of belonging, practices, and representations that are shared by the inhabitants of a particular community.^[7] The end of the mining industry in Almadén shook those foundations in a traumatic manner, producing what Demos calls “a radical rupture of transgenerational cultural traditions, the termination of secure relations to the land”, and leaving behind a series of social, political, industrial and environmental ruins, some of them still visible in the landscape as memorial signifiers of the end of this world.^[8]

Like many other locals from younger generations, I hardly knew anything about the 1984 strike until I met Pablo and started making a film with him in 2011. The first time Pablo mentioned the mining strike to me was around 5 weeks into the shoot. That day, Pablo opened one of the drawers underneath his TV and took out what it seemed to be a cardboard covered book called Recuerdos (Memories).^[9] Recuerdos was in fact a 1984 issue of a ‘Semana’ magazine, one of those popular celebrity magazines, which Pablo had transformed into a scrapbook which documented his 11 days of lockdown 600 meters underground. Pablo’s scrapbook contains the correspondence between the striking workers and Almadén Mining Company (MAYASA), press clippings, messages of support from the community as well as notes accompanying the gifts that came from the surface to make the life of the striking miners more bearable: folding chairs, newspapers, magazines, tobacco, cakes, fruit, etc. There was something in that book that affected Pablo. This becomes obvious from the beginning of the scene, when Pablo, after reading out the title Recuerdos, paused and added the word ‘tristes’ (sad).^[10]As the scene progresses and Pablo reads the different messages, his body starts showing signs of uneasiness, especially compared to his composure in other parts of the film, in which he is firm, assertive, ironic, and often grumpy. Traveling outside Pablo’s living room, we see the deserted mine esplanade and the ghostly industrial ruins. Rather than showing the strike itself, the scene gives the viewer access to the wound that the end of mining has left in this generation of miners. The scene ends with Pablo closing the album and stating a solemn “la historia es la historia”, which could be translated as “history is past”. It is precisely this “history is past” which Encierro tries to creatively put into question.

The scrapbook scene in Pablo's Winter presents the mining strike as a historical event anchored in the past, even though its emotional echoes still resonate in the present. Encierro seeks to transform that historical referent into a present event that will recreate the form and duration of the strike. Whereas Pablo had engaged in a process of documentation, transforming his experience of the 1984 lockdown into archive, as a local documentary filmmaker from Almadén I aimed to change the status of the 1984 strike from ‘archive’ back into real action. My intention is not to faithfully reenact the mining strike, but to use it as a model to act and reflect upon the present. Rather than documenting the past, I aim to put into motion a creative and social process that will become part and parcel of the everyday of the village during 11 days, with social transformation at its core.

The World’s End.

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