A Trojan Horse: Twenty-First Century Argentine Community Cinema as a Device of Decolonial Praxis

Abstract

In contemporary Argentina, if the overriding factor in subaltern groups’ integration into audio-visual production has been the technological democratization of resources, which allowed them to become literate in audio-visual language, we need to make clear that this “democratization of resources” also meant a “democratization of human resources”. This calls our attention to the task assumed by community audio-visual production facilitators who perform in a “critical frontier positioning” dynamic that involves the borderisation of knowledge (intellectual-artistic/popular) as their working framework. It also seeks to conceptualize power relations involved in its production-circulation processes, including its technical and rhetorical strategies to communicate through the senses (its aesthesis), as contestations to neoliberal logics self-perpetuating as the only possible ethical alternative in contemporary modus vivendi. In this scheme, community cinema emerges as an ethical-aesthetic performative device involved in decolonial aesthesis and decolonial pedagogy to advance toward the decolonial project. In this thesis' selected cases casted from peripheral geo-cultural locations, such functioning could be observed as a discourse of critical interculturalism consolidation operated by semio-practical processes of technological and territorial appropriation, some of which can be defined as: “resilient communication”, “aesthetic performance” and “techno-aesthetical embodiment”.