Popular, provincial, and mass manifestations have a complex relation with the cultural industry. Historically, they have been excluded from the certified high-culture guilds and the promoted global development and its protagonist, the homo digitalis. At the same time, they have been vindicated – and to a certain point instrumentalized – for more postmodern tendencies (as the kitsch and the camp), some socio-anthropological approaches, and political and marketing campaigns. We have also seen emerging political and popular tendencies through the time, created by their protagonist, no matter how anonymous, taking over their identity and territory. These emerging tendencies show us the village’s universal character and the validity of another kind of esthetics and unexpected tastes. 

The program of this documentary exhibition is a fresh and carefree wind that celebrates identity. From different ways, they point to a vindication of popular practices, the provincial, the amateur, the piracy, the recycling, the fighting for daily life, and even the reinterpretation, the syncretism, and the intervention of the traditional practices themselves that seemed immovable. Thanks to its polyvalence, this program, rooted in Latin America, provides us with some coordinates about other identities that mobilize in outsider territories and question the relation center-periphery. 

By Andrés Pedraza Tabares