Between 1984 and the making of Encierro, Almadén has gone from being the most productive mercury mines in world history to a post-industrial society in which unemployment, migration and lack of opportunities have come to replace the once flourishing mining industry. The lack of re-structural planning situates Almadén in the biggest crisis of its 2000 year-old history. Prompted by the gradual decay of the mines, Almadén region has passed from some 31.500 habitants in 1960 to around 10.800 in 2021, losing more than two thirds of its population and becoming an ageing and hard-hit community.[11] In 2012, UNESCO declared Almadén mine a World Heritage Site, turning the mine into a Mining Park open to tourism. Overall, Almadén has gone from being an industrial society to one that strives to manage the heritage, and ruins, of its industrial past.
The whole Almadén Mining Park is a big representational space, in which the visitor enters real underground galleries that stand for the mine but, as the old miners frequently state, it is not the mine.[12] In the mine visit-experience, instead of real miners, there are mannequins in working postures and gestures; instead of the noise of working duties such as perforation, transport of mineral, pumping, etc, there are pre-recorded sounds that stand for those absent working clatters. And instead of industrial works, there are stories about them. In short, our mining past is gone, and now it can only be accessed through representations.[13] Representation is the paradigm of post-industrial societies such as Almadén, in which everything seems to have already passed.
Inke Arns sees an important paradox at work in contemporary reenactment practices, namely, the desire for both shortening as well as creating a distance between the reenactments and the historical referents they are based upon.[14] For Arns, “one reason for this rather uncanny desire for performative repetition seems to reside in the fact that experience of the world, whether historical or contemporary, is based less and less on direct observation and today operates almost exclusively via media”.[15] In other words, our access to history, and to the world, is overwhelmingly mediated by images and representations. Striving for a more direct engagement with history, reenactment practices aim to find out “what the images we see might mean concretely to us, if we were to experience these situations personally.”[16] The paradox Arns identifies in artistic reenactment is based on a desire for “erasing distance to the images and at the same time distancing itself from the images.”[17] In post-industrial sites like Almadén, representations not only serve as access to the past, but whole towns seem to have retreated into a representational space. The need for a closer contact with our history, as well as distancing ourselves from the overwhelming representational paradigm that turns everything into past, is also at the core of Encierro.
Going inside the mine presented, for the participants in this project, an opportunity to feel part of something that has defined our identity, but that we never experienced directly. As some of the participants in the reenactment project state, “the mine was a constant subject of conversation in our house: the mine, the mine, and the mine.” The people of my generation have heard innumerable stories about it, yet the mine has always had a halo of mystery for us. Going inside the mine opened a window to feel in our bodies something that has always been transmitted to us through words and representations.[18] Along with that desire for getting closer to our ancestors through a more experiential access to the mine, there is also an awareness of the extreme distance between the reality of 1984 and the present. For instance, with the closure of the mine and the definitive loss of most of the jobs, the unions weakened to the point of practically disappearing in the area. The collective self is extremely damaged in post-industrial Almadén and therefore the conditions of possibility for collective action, like the strike of 1984, hardly exist.[19] Besides this dynamic of separation and connection, I wanted to explore in Encierro how the struggle of our mining ‘grandparents’ (even as model and absent object) could become a catalyst for social and community action in the present. I wanted to look at the past and its protagonists with the intention of finding an example that we could follow, and embody, now.[20]
Walter Benjamin describes the mimetic faculty as “the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else”.[21] The desire for a bodily approximation to a past experience in Encierro could be explained as this compulsion to become and behave like something else, in this case, somebody else, the striking miners of 1984. Developing Benjamin’s thesis, Michael Taussig argues in Mimesis and Alterity that “the wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power”.[22] This point is extremely important for Encierro. Our reenactment aimed at “granting the copy the character and power of the original, the representation the power of the represented”.[23] The ultimate motivation behind Encierro was in fact to achieve something similar to what they did in 1984: at least to give visibility to the social problems of Almadén and to inspire social action in the area. The historical referent for the reenactment project, therefore, was also a referent in a broader sense, a model to follow for a group of people looking for social change without knowing quite how to start acting upon reality. To merely represent the past felt short of a stronger desire, the desire to intervene in reality through artistic praxis.
What has lasted the most in the collective memory from the mining strike of 1984 is the sense of union and solidarity experienced in the community, as the messages in Pablo’s scrapbook testify. Locals describe it as a moment when “the entire village was there day and night”. By going to the dark depths of the mine, the miners of 1984 created an ‘excess’ of visibility for their social problems. By restraining their movements to the inside of the mine, they created social action on the surface. I guided my artistic process following these ideas of community union, action and solidarity, as well as the paradox of creating an excess of visibility by going into darkness, and generating social movement through an underground confinement. I turned my artistic inquiry into the form of a question, expressed in conditional terms: what if we locked ourselves in the mine now, in our post-industrial present; would we be able to awaken the feeling of community and give visibility to the current problems of the area? When thinking about the potential answers, I feared that the sense of community and the ability to fight together might have also disappeared together with the mining world.
I take the strike of 1984 to be a documentary ‘score’ which I need to adapt and perform in the current post-industrial reality.[24] I consider this a process of adaptation, appropriation, and citation, of a past event that occurred in a particular context (the mining Almadén), into a new context (the post-industrial Almadén 35 years later). The adaptation process necessitates maintaining, discarding, and above all transforming the historical reference, the model. A clear example is the selection of the 11 participants for the 2019 lockdown. In 1984, 11 male miners carried out the strike because only men worked in the galleries, and there was no female presence in the workers’ unions. I found it essential to rethink how to treat this aspect in the process of selecting participants for the 2019 reenactment. Whereas in 1984 the strike was part of the workers movement, in 2019, the lockdown needs to be understood as a broader social reclamation, not tied to workers’ claims. It would not make sense to restrict the casting to only male participants. The reenactment of the strike does not strive for verisimilitude, rather for adapting the political and social actions of the past into social and political “gestures” in the present.[25] The participants would not have to represent the old miners, if anything, they have to be present as current inhabitants of the area.
During the development and pre-production phase, people interested in being one of the 11 strikers, as well as people interested in helping with the organization and production, join the project. Several group meetings are held. Besides talking about the organization and logistics of the artistic project, the group often engages in conversations and round-table discussions about the situation in the area. The preparation of the project seems at times very close to community politics or to the formation of a grassroots organization. An artistic and a social side of the project begin to appear and coexist. More concretely, the artistic initiative fosters and allows encounters in which people get to know each other and share their social concerns. Below, we will see how the double nature of the project as artistic and social intervention creates both opportunities for social engagement as well as tensions related to it. This double nature is also at the core of the gradual metamorphosis that the project will undergo through the 11 days of the reenactment.
The prospect of living inside the mine for 11 days is an extreme commitment for the project’s participants. It is not only the dark, humid and uncomfortable underground environment that present a challenge for the interested participants. The question of how to balance these 11 days underground with other commitments on the surface such as potential work, family life and any other responsibilities, becomes an issue. Eventually, some interested participants cannot commit to the lockdown. Apart from their willingness and availability, I selected the participants for their degree of involvement in the current social problems of the area, not for any possible acting capacities, personality traits, etc. Looking for socially engaged people was my way of adapting the concept of trade union membership to the post-union context of 2019. The final group of 11 participants was made up of men, women, people from different towns in the area, ethnic and gender minorities, and people who have had to emigrate, like myself (I was one of the participants locked down in 2019). Poignantly, Celia, one of the locked down participants, is Pablo Marjalizo’s granddaughter. During the lockdown, Celia slept on the same mattress her grandfather used 35 years earlier.