A film workshop held for Bolivian miners in 1983 produced a cache of films that were then lost in Bolivia and forgotten in French archives, and this project will recover and digitise them. The problem is that early transnational film workshops in the Global South—set up by Western NGOs to address inequalities in culture and communication—left behind fragmented, neglected archives. Scholars cannot study these films or understand how local and global agendas shaped them because the materials are scattered and inaccessible. This project fills that gap by tracing the Miners Film Workshop of Bolivia, one of the first such cooperations in Latin America. If successful, the research will create a digital counter-archive—an online platform making all films and related materials freely accessible. This does not change a physical system like a power grid, but it alters the infrastructure of cultural memory. It restitutes a lost history to Bolivia and gives scholars a concrete case study of how North-South cultural cooperation actually worked in the 1980s, including the frictions between local unions and international funders. The project is fundamentally about recovering and preserving neglected cultural heritage, with no immediate practical application beyond that.
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From the 1970s to the 1980s, international organizations and western NGOs promoted film training workshops and media transference projects in peripheral countries. Through cooperation for development projects, film workshops sought to address global inequalities in culture and communication. However, globalization defined the material infrastructures and transnational networks with which these projects had to negotiate. "Frictions" between local and global agendas shaped the resulting films, but also their later circulation and archival conservation. My project tackles this issue through the study, reactivation and restitution of a hitherto lost archive of one of these film workshops: the Miners Film Workshop of Bolivia (1983). Promoted by a French NGO and a Bolivian mining union, it is one of the earliest experiences of transnational cooperation through film training workshops in Latin America, and the first to take place in Bolivia. Films produced in this workshop were soon neglected and lost in Bolivia, while remained unnoticed in French archives. Relevant and extensive documentation now available allows for an in-depth approach to this workshop, for which interdisciplinary and self-reflexive methodologies will be mobilized. Drawing on film history and theory, ethnography and film preservation studies, the project brings its contribution to current scholarly efforts to map transnational film cultures by situating film workshops in peripheral countries as key sites of North-South cultural cooperation in the 1980s. In addition, this project calls for restitution. Accordingly, it is designed as a counter-archive, relying on digital practices to preserve its neglected memories. A digital archive will make accesible all films and related materials produced through the action in an online platform. In this manner, I will reactivate and restitute the complexity of material determinations, entangled memories and ambiguous cultural legacies of the Miners Film Workshop.
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