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?

Even though play might be seen as ’less serious than life’, Encierro works with the hypothesis that play has the capacity to access important aspects of reality, critically approach them, and even rework them.^[42] Having 11 neighbours inside the mines for 11 days creates special dynamics in the village. The community starts gathering every evening in the mine esplanade to support their neighbours underground. Partly because of having family members, friends and neighbours underground, partly because the collective memory of the strike of 1984 is that “the entire village was there”, the mine esplanade becomes a place for daily encounters between the members of the community. The role of TV, radio and newspapers, which increasingly cover the event, also has a powerful effect on engaging people with this artistic intervention. It attracts political attention to Almadén beyond the original scope of the project. As a result, both participants and the involved community members outside the galleries start realizing that this is also a good opportunity to express their discontent and to fight for this post-industrial area.

The entanglement of participants, community, media and politics creates a metamorphosis in the project. Some of the participants feel that presenting their lockdown as a documentary film diminishes the realness of the social movement they have now started in the area. They all agree that the film is the initial force of the lockdown, but now the lockdown has been transformed into something else. At this point, the creative part, loosely understood as a homage to the struggling mining generations, and the social part (that is, the intention of turning the homage into present action), begin to take parallel paths, but still coexist. This coexistence becomes increasingly entangled. Several newspapers reflect this transformation in headlines that read as: “what started as a documentary film project turns into a social movement in Almadén".^[43] As the days progress, the basic frame of “as if it was a strike” starts being stretched. As one of the locked down participants expresses, “it is not clear for me whether this is a film about a strike, or a real strike”. While the real lockdown of the participants inside the mine engages the community into social action, the engagement on the surface further inspires and moves the participants underground. The sense of social apathy, the negativity, the “everybody sees the village dying and nobody does anything” transforms into social action and to a sense of unity and community similar to that of 1984. There is a widespread feeling in the community that something real is happening. The representational aspect of the project starts dissolving. Rather than representing of the past, participants start identifying with the past. As one of the participants says, “I’m starting feeling like a real syndicalist”. In the political meetings around the shaft, the participants demand concrete political commitments.^[44] Whereas the documentary film project appropriated aspects of the mining past into the creation of the event, the participants now ‘appropriate’ the documentary film to demand political commitment. Moreover, they start considering the possibility of staying in the mine beyond the agreed duration of 11 days if those agreements do not come. In the beginning, they say it in passing, but gradually in more serious terms.

“One thing is the documentary film being made; and then there is the social movement. People have engaged into action; they have said ‘this is enough’. We don’t want to stop now.” Supporter of Encierro from the surface.

Is this Play?

The conditional premise at work for this artistic intervention, We Would Strike, is turning into something more like We Are Striking. Tensions arise between the participants, the mine company management and the creatives of the film, who could get into serious legal troubles if participants decide to stay beyond the permission granted to stay in the mine. That is, if we break the rules of the game. The mine representatives try to convince the participants that all the mobilizations happening on the surface are only a fiction. According to them, the people on the surface are merely reproducing what happened in 1984. As one of the mine representatives says, they have interiorized those roles and “are expressing them in a natural way, which is the best possible acting.” Using terms as “main and secondary actors”, and defining other elements as ”atrezzo” (props), the mine representatives make an effort to resituate the project within the cinematographic realm. The participants oppose this view and argue that the management is resisting the obvious, which is that the documentary project has channelled the real frustration and desire for social transformation of the people from this area. As the director of the reenactment project, I have passed from being the initiator of the event to being entangled in a reality that has exceeded its own framework as a representation of the past. My position as one of the lockdown participants, local to the area and committed to the social action generated through the reenactment, is complicated by my desire to salvage the cinematographic project, which also depends on abandoning the mine on the agreed day, and not breaching the contract established between our production company and the mine. A question hovers over the people most closely involved in the project: is this a film, or a protest disguised as a film? Following Bateson, we can claim that we are reaching the limit of play, in which “This is play” turns into a disconcerting “Is this play?”^[45]

At this time, the project has taken a life of its own. Documentation, and reenactment as representation, fall short of fully grasping what the artistic project has generated. To fully understand it, we need to move from the realm of representation and signification (what the project is saying) to the realm of action and performance (what the project is doing). In other words, rather than representation of the world, we need to also situate it as an intervention in the world. We might be close to what Simon O’Sullivan means by the function of art over its power of signification, or representation, when he writes:

“art, then, might be understood as the name for a function: a magical, an aesthetic, function of transformation. Art is less involved in making sense of the world and more involved in exploring the possibilities of being, of becoming, in the world. Less involved in knowledge and more involved in experience, in pushing forward the boundaries of what can be experienced.”^[46]

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