Everyday banality in a documentary by teenage women: between the trivial and the extreme. Schooling and desiring in contexts of extreme urban poverty

Abstract

In this article, I offer some reflections on a video documentary workshop for students in the first year of middle school. The workshop, which was held in 2008, took place in a school in an area of extreme urban poverty in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, Argentina, specifically in one of the more and more common spaces usually called shantytowns. The students were asked to conceive of, produce and film a documentary video. The only restriction was that the project be about their daily life and not be fictional, because the project was constructed as an opportunity to create, in the context of the school, spaces for thinking about and problematising the world. The workshop itself and its product – a documentary about trash and waste in the neighbourhood – confront us with the fact that the material conditions of existence can never be isolated from desire and the will to live. Doing is always constituted in certain conditions of existence and, returning to Deleuze and Guattari, desire is always close to those conditions. This experience of doing entails the life of subjects, the dynamics of school life but also – and here I am going to speak of what these young women made, in which they express their interests, concerns, desires and aspirations – political statements insofar as an affirmation of life and the flows of desire.