Adriana Vila Guevara, anthropologist and filmmaker, writes in this text a meditation derived from the creative process surrounding her film Belén(2016). In this text she reflects on the contradictions of a creative process (that of a cinematic process) that comes from a context that somehow limits its own creative independence, more so if it is to be compared to the previous freedom of an ethnographic work.”I was entering into the mechanics of the cinematic industry, which would give me some benefits and learnings but also would imply sacrifices, involving a whole range of duties, obligations and limitations. It had already started. The initiation had begun, there was no turning back”.

 

This text is part of our series About the impossibility of anthropological cinema.

Puta Mina is being shown between October the 24th of 2019 and January the 12th of 2020 in Centro de Arte y Naturaleza (CDAN, Huesca) in a collection of works produced by more than thirty artists. This exhibition reflects on the impact that the mining industry has on the landscape, environment, society and earth. In doing so it offers a point of view on the relation between nature and technology, ecology and science and between past and future.

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From LAAV_ we would like to thank Fundación Daniel y Nina Carasso for the support and backing offered for four years. This support helped to create and consolidate a space that is now a reference not only to other museums, but to the film sphere.

With the creation of LAAV_, the museum was proposing new ways of collaborative practice in which to join production, research, arts and action on communities. In short, to transform the way we create culture from the institutions.

For that, support from MUSAC, museum in which the laboratory is located, has been capital. However, without the support and collaboration from Fundación Daniel y Nina Carasso this adventure would not have started on the first place.

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After months of work we are introducing the interactive map in which the process behind Libertad project is detailed. The interactive map was designed, executed and conceptualized by Daniela Martagón. Web design by solserpiente. We are introducing the interactive map along with the film in the  National Museum of Anthropology (Madrid) on Saturday the 14th of September at 12:00. Furthermore, on the 20th of September the same project will be discussed on the International Producers Meeting Encuentro 3XDOC , promoted by  DOCMA.  Click here to access the interactive map.

“Experiencing shared learning could also involve approaching that point at which one stops creating work, of wanting a product, where cinema no longer attains images, as suggested by Peter Pál Pelbart with regard to Fernand Deligny. Attaining things as a process or as an event, wherever they emerge, occur and are repeated by being different, without the aim of encapsulating them in a mould for their dissemination in the media.. The value of the document today could lie instead in generating a debate or an interrogation, that of representing an invitation to participate in this process, not that of a witness of a supposed truth to be disseminated.” Continue reading

Jorge Moreno, anthropologist and filmmaker expert in memory and repression, reflects about the film Libertad on how audiovisual anthropology can face the use of materials from the past, a complex exercise that involves both thinking the cinematographic language and the interpretation of sensitive materials or the limits of representation.

 

“The control exerted by concepts in the analysis of reality when we write a text is not transferable to film language. “Closing of concept” does not work well with “opening by film” […]  The interesting thing about this dialogue is precisely to understand that the marriage of anthropology and cinema works in the sense that concept is renounced and context embraced; those situations that, selected cinematographically, remind us that one of the ways to produce knowledge in this discipline lies in offering a place from which to look at reality”. Continue reading