Tenacious remnants and steaming disobedience: or how the bolivian documentalists of the eighties made their own the anarchist memory (s)

Abstract

As part of a broader research focused on a series of videographic cases that address the history of work in Bolivia during the first decades of the 20th century, made by young female video-makers during the 1980s, this article aims to reconstruct material conditions and practices that made Voices of freedom (Raquel Romero, 1989) possible, as well as the socio-historical framework in which it was inserted, the forms of interaction with institutional projects (public and private) and the senses about the past that were mobilized to its around. As in A each night follows a dawn (Cecilia Quiroga and THOA, 1986) and Everlasting flower (Liliana De la Quintana, 1988), the purpose of the audiovisual is the visibility of trajectories and ways of grouping anarchists that, being prior to the Revolution of 1952, were deliberately disparaged and/or excluded in the hegemonic narratives of both political history and the workers —where the party-state (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement), union (Central Obrera Boliviana) and masculine perspectives prevailed. The purpose of the team that made the video is to raise awareness and sensitize grassroots organizations and popular sectors about the originality of this tradition of struggle and to challenge a present of social atomization, hopelessness and lack of utopias. After mapping the historical scenario in which the audiovisual emerged and describing its conditions of possibility, we will present a conceptual perspective based on the thoughts of Enzo Traverso, Michael Pollak and Nelly Richard from which to understand the main narrative strategies of the video —the testimonies of the and the old libertarian artisans and their respective recreations– for, in the last section, to advance in the analysis of the video, observing its particularities in visual and soty terms.