We Would Strike!: Beyond Representation in a Post-Industrial Town.

Arturo Delgado Pereira

On 30 July 1984, 11 mercury miners locked down in the mines of Almadén (Ciudad Real, southern Spain) to protest against their precarious economic and social conditions. 650 metres deep inside the oldest and most productive mercury mines in world history, the miners endured the dark and contaminated galleries for 11 days and nights until their claims were addressed. As an emigrated local filmmaker, I come back to post-industrial Almadén in 2019 to make a documentary film about the mining strike. The premise is to find young locals willing to live inside the now-closed mines for 11 whole days in homage to the older miners and to recreate the experience of 1984, 35 years later. Apart from engaging our collective mining past, performing the form and duration of a previous workers strike, Encierro proposes the underground as a living and symbolic space to foster a series of conversations, encounters, and social and political propositions to reimagine Almadén, which rose from a mine shaft more than 2000 years ago, as ‘something else besides’ a mining town. This exposition explores the potential of documentary film fieldwork to take on a different relationship to normal life that the same or similar events would have as ‘untransformed reality’ – a strike versus the reenactment of a strike – and its potential for activism and social transformation. I will also explore the use of the conditional tense in documentary; a speculative and hypothetical approach to reality sensitive to the ‘potentially’ real, the ‘possible’, and the ‘what if’ as modes of documentation. What happens when the forms of ‘documentary’ and ‘reenactment’ are exceeded, and act upon the world rather than only represent it?

Almadén rose as a town from these mining shafts, and it is the decay of the mines which has made Almadén crumble. The mine has provided work, livelihood, community, identity, pride, progress. It has also brought about sickness, death, exploitation, slavery, struggle, abandonment. The underground in Almadén is both a place for life and for death, and mines in general cannot be understood without that entanglement. The dynamics of life and death are also present in this project. The general view in Almadén now is that we are in a different kind of hole, a dark shaft, due to the state of financial and social depression caused by the closure of the mine and the lack of restructuring plans. Encierro turns that metaphor into its driving force. During 11 days, the participants will live in the most representative hole of Almadén (the underground mine) in an attempt to collectively imagine a more hopeful future around a mining shaft. The ‘Voyage to the Center of Earth’ in Encierro is meant as an underground journey in search of connection with our origins and ancestors, but also as a trip to the darkness in search of a path that could make us see some bright light at the end of the tunnel. As the group of 11 participants gathered and discussed the situation of Almadén, a motto emerged: “Del Pozo Se Sale”. This could be roughly translated as “We’ll get out of the hole”.^[28]

The mine is both a real space in which they are living, and a symbolic space that has shaped the identity of Almadén over centuries. Even though the mine is closed for production, the underground is a real space and, in fact, a potentially dangerous one. The intervention presents some risks to the participants, who have not any prior experience of spending extended time inside a mine.^[29]The combination of a real and symbolic experience grants the 11 days spent inside the mine a ritualistic character. The participants inside the mine are ‘removed’ from the realm of their everyday life, and are immersed into the no-time/no-space of the dark cave. This in betweenness of the underground mine can be compared to Victor Turner’s concept of liminality.^[30] In Turner’s ritual theory, liminality is a transitional space. The liminal is “a no-man’s-land betwixt-and-between the structural past and the structural future.”^[31] Turner describes liminality as “a fructile chaos, a fertile nothingness, a storehouse of possibilities, not by any means a random assemblage but a striving after new forms and structure, a gestation process, a fetation of modes appropriate to and anticipating postliminal existence.”^[32] In other words, liminality is the time and space of transformation, the darkness in which life and death, and fear and hope coexist.

The Hole.

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The mines are closed to production, mostly flooded, and turned into a heritage site. The mines were emptied first; then the village.^[26]Almadén’s mercurial spirit has been extracted, and left empty to wander through its own industrial ruins.^[27]

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