Reenactment as Social Action: The Making of 'Encierro'

Abstract

Before a documentary film becomes representation —something about reality— it is an event that happens in reality. It is a creative and social process that intervenes in the place and historical time where it takes place. This article builds from the artistic research I developed for the film project Encierro, a documentary recreation of a mining strike in my hometown of Almadén (Ciudad Real) in 1984. It explores the capacity of fieldwork, artistic methodologies, and documentary filming to intervene directly in reality and go beyond documentation, representation, and signification processes. Encierro is based on a local historical event, in which 11 miners locked down as a protest 650 meters underground in the mercury mines of Almadén for 11 days. This project proposes a similar underground lockdown of 11 people and 11 days 35 years later, now when the mine of Almadén is closed for production and we suffer the ruinous effects of the lack of restructuring plans. Ultimately, this reenactment raises the question of whether the recreation of a strike can also be considered as such, even though in post-industrial Almadén there is no more mining, no more production to close, and this “strike” does not come from a labor action, but from artistic practice.