Episodes of video power supporting barrio women in Chacao, Venezuela

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to the literature on video power by showing how marginalised communities and groups can be empowered by using raw research footage to support their community struggles. The footage represents activities headed by a group of barrio women who were about to establish a ‘socialist commune’ in Chacao, which at that time was the most elite municipality in Caracas, Venezuela. The raw footage has been assembled in an archive of 70 video episodes collected through participatory observation between 2010 and 2014. The researcher respected the community's wishes regarding when, where and for what purposes the footage would be shot, and drew on a ‘feminist practice of looking’. The episodes have been studied with material feminism as an instrument of self-definition, representation and self-representation. In terms of self-definition, the use of video episodes empowered women and the community, reaffirming their insurgent identity as strong performers of people's power in relation to influential politicians and scholars. In terms of strategies of self-representation, the length, contents and character of the video episodes were all essential to developing video power. Their length made it possible to represent in minute detail women's broad participation in the actions and their handling of situations that arose. In terms of their character, they represented the leadership of women in the spontaneous incidents of insurgent citizenship and the scheduled events to support their insurgent urbanism. The contents represented how spokeswomen used emotions as an ‘extended language’ to move people to action and to nuance the ‘the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real’ beyond decrees and documents.