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?

Conclusion

During the making of this reenactment there was intense social and political activity in the area, a ‘collective effervescence’, to borrow Émile Durkheim´s term.^[47] This was closely related to the actual presence of 11 people living inside the cave, the continuous support of the community above ground, and the engagement of mass media in the project. As one of the outside participants put it, “it all looked like a dream”. Another person explained about the reenactment: “during those days you would cross someone in the street and you wanted to say hello, you felt closer to each other, part of the same thing”. The vermillion-cinnabar colour ribbons that the community made and distributed to support the new strikers appeared everywhere in the area: on people’s clothes, in their cars, on the balconies of people’s houses as well as institutional buildings, etc. But even though many of those ribbons are still visible in Almadén 2 years after the reenactment, the intensity and the social engagement of those summer days of 2019 are gone.

The making of Encierro was a gesture towards increasing participatory politics in the area. Around San Aquilino’s shaft, 50 meters underground, the lockdown participants gathered with local politicians, educators, health experts, representatives of tourism and heritage, teenagers, entrepreneurs, etc., engaging in a collective dialogue to identify the main problems affecting us. In Encierro, descending vertically into the ground created a horizontal and transversal space for collective political imagination. During the lockdown, the participants shaped the content of those conversations into a series of social and political claims, which arising from the depths of the mine eventually reached the Regional Parliament.^[48] During the reenactment, a former Citizen Platform called ‘Forzados’ got re-activated in the area.^[49] Currently, this citizen platform has around 2000 members, including most participants of the reenactment. Forzados still engages in social action to which a considerable number of people from the area respond with their presence and support.^[50] A Youth Association called ´El Fuerte de la Mina´ (‘The Fortress of the Mine’) has been also formed in Almadén after the reenactment. Some of its members were participating actively in the meetings and activities held during Encierro.

The reenactment has meant for many of its participants a decisive moment to engage more fully in social and political action. The reenactment can be seen as embodying the transformation from a frustrated desire for change into social action. This paradox – an engagement with the future via restaging of the past – is at the centre of the work. With its material and symbolic characteristics, the mine became a liminal time and space for this transformation to happen. However, this transformation cannot be understood as permanent, and it can easily revert. For instance, the opportunities for participatory politics in the area are still as scarce as they were before the making of Encierro. Moreover, to keep the social engagement and the collective action alive, as well as achieving concrete socio-economic improvements, is proving to be more difficult than it promised to be while inside the mine.

We can highlight the idealistic and usually short span of artistic interventions such as Encierro. However, I prefer to focus on the capacity that artistic interventions of this kind have to penetrate reality and transform, albeit briefly, the interpersonal, social and political dynamics of the areas in which they happen. Artistic propositions like Encierro propose activities “where conventional structure is no longer honored, but [are] more playful, more open to chance”, and “more likely to be subversive, consciously or by accident introducing or exploring different structures that may develop into real alternatives to the status quo”^[51]Under the framework of artistic interventions, it is possible to propose and enact new practices (or reenact old ones like in this instance) that become possibilities for alternative social engagements and political configurations, a process that, like in Encierro, is not free from tensions, paradoxes and even contradictions. It is important to reflect upon this transformative power from the point of view of artistic practice itself, as it will continue to help us define the roles of (engaged) art and artists in society. Crucially, we should keep deepening our understanding of the social, political and historical implications of these interventions, to help us navigate the paradoxes they bring up. For instance, are not the spaces for social and political imagination created by these artistic practices both exciting opportunities for social and political engagement as well as potent warnings of the lack of these spaces in our everyday lives, institutions and politics? Moving ‘beyond representation’ necessitates being alert to both the power and the limits of documentary practices in the field of civil society, as well as their potential to (re)connect and complicate past, present and future narratives.

Back

Home

Tip

Tip