Proyectos de investigación /
Strange Objects
Super 8 films and filmic counter-pedagogies in Latin America
This project aims to recover, preserve and circulate materials produced in the framework of the first Super 8 workshops carried out in Latin America with social organisations.
Born from imperfect solidarities, these workshops emerged at the margins of the international development cooperation structures after the late seventies. They were conceived as instruments for the audiovisual decolonization of the subaltern classes and as the foundations for future film archives of popular memory. In this sense, they carried forward the legacy of Latin American political cinemas, anticipating the widespread use of media workshops and community video production in the following years.
Most of the films we will work with have been inaccessible for decades. Others survive only in fragments—as outtakes, unfinished projects, or personal recollections. Almost all of them were made by non-professional filmmakers. For these reasons, they occupy at best a marginal place in the history of Latin American political cinema. Strange Objects thus seeks, in addition, to map the networks, debates and infrastructures on which these experiences were built; to ensure access to films; to develop frameworks, research methodologies and tools that make them legible again in the present; and to work towards their restitution.
Miners' Film Workshop (Telamayu, Bolivia; 1983)
The project is currently focused on gathering films and materials recovered from the Miners’ Film Workshop (Telamayu, Bolivia, 1983). This workshop trained 16 sons and daughters of miners in documentary research techniques and direct cinema methodologies. It arose from the collaboration between the French Association Varan and the Union Federation of Bolivian Mineworkers (FSTMB), one of the most powerful unions in Latin America. As such, it was a pioneering experiment in radical pedagogy and proletarianization of audiovisual media, which gave rise to the production of 13 films, now restored in their original Super 8 format.
Thanks to a collaboration agreement with the Ateliers Varan association, we will work with the photographic, documentary and audiovisual material from the Miners’ Film Workshop, preserved in the Ateliers Varan archive and in the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA). We will also draw on different Bolivian private and institutional archives, such as the Líber Forti archive, Cinemateca Boliviana and the FSTMB’s Union Documentation and Information System. In doing so, we aim to decentralize and reveal the complexity of the memories surrounding this experience, drawing on diverse—and sometimes contradictory—sources.
Ultimately, the study on the Miners’ Film Workshop also provides a space to reflect, through the archival research work, on new ways of reimagining and weaving into the present the transnational solidarity networks that once sustained such experiences.
Strange Objects project forms part of the Z-A (Filmakers’ Archive), a project run by the EQZE in collaboration with Medialab Tabakalera, which aims to create an archive and document centre on the poetics of cinema exploring how the profession and talent of making and viewing film has been communicated, taught, transmitted and shared. Other previous research chapters include the Genealogies of Learning project (2021-2023).
Technical data sheet
Lead investigator:
Miguel Errazu
Collaborating researchers:
Miguel Hilari, Isabel Seguí
Students 2024-2025:
Alejandra Larrea Galarza, Amina Ferley Yael, Evelyn Ruiz Gómez, Jorge Fernández Jaramillo, Laura Dávila Argoty, María Vaughan Gomez
Students 2023-2024:
Andoni Imaz, Andrea de la Torre Perleche, Claire Mullen, Júlia Izaguirre, Laura Gabay, Marga Almirall
Associated institutions:
Ateliers Varan, Medialab Tabakalera, Centre for Visual Anthropology of Goldsmiths, University of London
Timeframe:
2023 - ongoing
“Strange objects” is a project carried out in collaboration with the Centre for Visual Anthropology of Goldsmiths, University of London, and the UKRI research project “TRAMA. Tracing Cooperation. Images, memories and archival restitutions of early film workshops in Bolivia” (“Horizon Europe Guarantee” program, ref. EP/Z001919/1)