We publish two new texts around Puta mina (Damned mine): The voices of the mine. Regarding the process in creating Puta mina (Damned Mine), by Chus Domínguez, and La palabra frente a la oscuridad, un prólogo para Puta Mina, by Daniel Bernabé

Contradictory fragments collected in the ruins of visual anthropology. A lucid and critical reflection of the Portuguese anthropologist and filmmaker Gonçalo Mota, with whom we continue a collective construction project about the possibilities / impossibilities of audiovisual anthropology.

On Tuesday 8 May, we participate in Encuentros Sociología Ordinaria (Medialab-Prado, Madrid) with “Comunidades, audiovisual e investigación experimental; una experiencia de antropología y arte” (Communities, audiovisual and experimental research; an anthropological experience and art”. The slogan of the meetings this year is “We do it and we shall see”, an emotional tribute to the essence of Sociología Ordinaria, with the objective of breaking the academic walls, including other voices and experiences.

First of all LAAV_ is an experimental project, an empirical and procedural laboratory. Each part of its processes is approached as an experiment of creation, a learning experiment and as a research experiment. It always tests different paths to collectively learn, to stimulate co-learning, which construct collaborative experiences of research and collective creation. This text is also an experiment, a textual laboratory. It does not aim to explain the work of LAAV_, but rather to dialogue with it to collectively develop a theoretical experimentation. (Seguir leyendo)

We collect several reflections from the Laav_17 Meetings held last October as Creation / Research / Groups. Art as a critical practice with communities. Speakers María Acaso and Mafe Moscoso, and participants, Diego Pérez and Sara Potxemutxa, build a first-person-polyhedral story which takes us to the development of the meetings experience. Montse Romaní, who could not attend the meetings due to health issues, contextualizes two examples of collaborative cinema that we programmed.

Text about La Rara Troupe from  researcher and curator Alfredo Aracil, who accompanied us at LAAV_16 Meetings and curated the exhibition project Apuntes para una psiquiatría destructiva in sala Arte Joven in Madrid.

“We might say that the images and sounds produced by La Rara Troupe in their videos and sonic work are aimed at producing their own images that, displaced from the puerile sentimentality that usually confirms the image of that other that society calls excluded, create their own territory, a house in which to be recognised. This is not so much the certainty of what should be done as the question of how we do so”.

Un texto del comisario de vídeo y cine Andy Davies en torno al proyecto Puta mina, a partir de su participación en los Encuentros LAAV_16, cuando el proyecto aún estaba en la fase de grabación.

“Sin duda el trabajo de LAAV no va a acabar en ninguna alfombra roja: cuando se cede el control para emprender un trabajo colectivo en el campo audiovisual, los resultados son solo una parte de la obra, tal vez ni siquiera la parte más importante. Nadie sabe a ciencia cierta a qué se parece ese trabajo colectivo, no se puede decir si se ve en la pantalla o no; quizás está ahí pero no somos capaces de verlo. El lenguaje, cualquier lenguaje, tiene esto de paradójico: no hay nada que no se pueda decir, pero nunca se dice nada del todo”.