Barricada TV (Argentina)

In early 2008, the cultural commission of an Argentinean organization of employed and unemployed workers decided to set up a video workshop in conjunction with Cine Insurgente (Rebel Cinema). The objective was to explore and build a political and communication instrument to serve as a vehicle for collective discussions and political concerns and simultaneously operate as a stage for some new social relations.

The commission drew on the perspectives of a leading Argentinean media activist, Raymundo Gleyzer, who argued in 1970 that cinema is a counterinformation weapon, not a military type of weapon, an information tool for the grassroots, and that this was its added value at that period in the class struggle. Decades later, many activist video and film groups in Argentina are reviving his tradition to bring their struggles, projects, and ways of seeing the world to the screen. Precisely because they consider that building people's power also means building a new revolutionary mentality, Barricada TV's People's News added another “trench” in this “war of position”—in Antonio Gramsci's sense of those terms.

Builders of an audiovisual space of this kind needed to be alert to Gleyzer's warning against reproducing the harmful ways of thought that, even in the name of a collective project, led individuals to emphasize the uniqueness of their contributions to the task. He would say that media activists needed to learn from how a factory worker, bound to the production process for 8 hours a day on a specific task (say, attaching doors in a car factory), is fully aware he is working with a group without whom he cannot finish the product, cannot complete the car. He knows what group labor is, what teamwork is, and he lives it every day. He has developed the sense of working collectively, of joining together with a group to make a specific product.

Thus, holding fast to these insights, and having to build its own agenda from issues emerging from political struggles, Barricada undertook the task of collective training in video skills. In a period of mainstream television dominance and free-market dogma, Barricada TV set out to narrate the world within the news format, but with the collective aim of building a people's news service that could serve as a foundation for the long-held project to set up an alternative TV channel.

Within this setting, after many debates and discussions, including initial camera forays, the notion began to emerge of Barricada TV as a politically active audiovisual group, adopting the format of a people's news bulletin, constructed according to their priorities and challenging dominant media frames. In this fashion, the Barricada collective was embodying the interventions that emerged during the 1990s resistance against neoliberalism in other settings and that, above all, were based in the 2001 rebellion, which, as for many people, combusted in the streets and laid the foundations of the collective's present practice.

In this sense, the Barricada TV collective do not consider themselves artists or to have a primarily aesthetic purpose (though they do not dismiss experimentation), but above all as political and social activists who decide to make videos as a tool to enable people to organize. Thus, Barricada TV is not simply a group of people who dedicate themselves to filming various conflicts and grassroots experiences. First and foremost they are an action group that tries to transform the reality they live.

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