Brief occupation of the courthouse (working title)

Application summary

I aim at completing an investigation and realisation of an audiovisual art work, that ask for the pertinence of moving-image in producing a compelling form of peoples uprisings. Claiming that the formal particularities of film, allow for re-situating distant geographies and actualizing past events. Questions of actuality of the events investigated , and representation as a category both artistic and political are at the center of this project. Departing from a specific event, a wave of peoples uprising in the altiplano region of Bolivia between the year 2000 and 2005, the work-plan focus on the usurpation and destruction of a police station and court house in the small town of Achacachi in the Bolivian altiplano during April 2000. The specific event I want to focus on took place during the roadblocks between April and September 2000 in The Altiplano region of Bolivia. Community members expelled local authorities from the Achacachi mayor’s office, burned documents and archives that contained the procedures to survey and title land, opened jails and burned legal records. Similarly they destroyed and burned police offices, and they expelled high-ranking members of the national police of the town. The displacement of state institutions and the “de facto” autonomous control of vast Aymara territories was, in my view, one of the two most significant aspects of the uprising during the period. The symbolic and political force of these actions can be read as the break down of dynamic of the State. It was the expression, revelation and decisive practice of a particular way of living, producing, and struggling against the established order. It is the collapse of sovereignty as an organizing element through the State. Understanding this as a meta-institution that has a monopoly on politics, and the legal and juridical order of the people. Thus a space appears in which subjectivity comes from below, from a place outside the institutions.