Theory - zalab.org

“From the beginning about twenty individuals had understood that the road to take was not that of Hollywood, that the show started on the Lumière boulevards was the principle of evil. (…) Instead it was important to take possession of the medium at such a low cost to put it within reach of many, individuals, such as paper, ink, colors, to introduce in the film houses and lenses, like the sewing machine.“

As written by Cesare Zavattini in the mid-60s, foretelling – and already practicing in his free newsreels – a type of cinema capable of sprouting away from the world of large producers, popular in the production process even before the content, made “by many for many “: a form of expression and creative freedom suddenly made possible by relatively cheap production tools like the 8mm cameras were then. In the fifty years that have passed since those first experiments of popular cinema, there are many examples of post-zavattiniani journeys that have gone through the official worlds of cinema but not only.

It is carried out through informal training workshops, which focus both on the social transformation process and on the audiovisual product.

A Participatory video is a shared audiovisual production practice. As a type of social action recognized by UNESCO, it offers instruments of expression to marginalized groups and normally excluded from the mass media. It is carried out through informal training workshops, which focus both on the social transformation process and on the audiovisual product. The participatory video for ZaLab is the workshop of ideas. The laboratories are aimed at those who live in the margins of society, but for this reason can offer a completely new look at reality. These people become protagonists of our stories, which can be limited to the experience of the laboratory, or become part of a more complex process and become subjects of our documentary films.

In the galaxy of post-zavattinian experiments, there are those like us of ZaLab, who have chosen the name in homage to our teacher (Za da Zavattini, Lab from laboratories), has dedicated his research to experimentation in the context of a process social video production “free”. A really new cinema, television, and web diffusion, that arises from the participatory process of collecting and processing collective micro-stories of the newspaper by unaccredited eyes, what is called “Participatory Video”.

Objective

Each participatory video workshop is a unique and unrepeatable experience, and here starts the difficulty in cataloging different “types”. An important yardstick is the aim of the laboratory, which can oscillate between greater attention to the process (mainly social purpose) or to the product (mainly the purpose of audiovisual production).

<

Turn On My Light – Biennale Venice 2017

TURN ON MY LIGHT is a participatory video workshop that has a primarily communicative purpose. People of this kind were then called upon to give feedback on the issue. It is a project that ZaLab conducted in the Central Pavilion of the Gardens of the 57th Biennale of Venice. The issue was to make short films that tell the perception of the experience of the Venice Biennale by migrants.

<

Laboratorio Video Partecipativo Flying Roots

FLYING ROOTS on the contrary it is a project that has a mainly social purpose, we started from the witnesses (the workshop participants themselves) to find the issue. A social cinema project with teenagers in the multi-ethnic district of Piazza Vittorio in Rome. Starting from the history of the participants and a reflection on their own identity, we have created cinematic stories in which everyone becomes the author of his own life experience.

The group

The group is the supporting soul of a participatory video workshop. The individual glances of the participants come together within the group, which through a process of research, listening, selection, staging, realization, become the author of the stories told. The group allows a feedback circuit at a horizontal level, in which there is no one who judges and who is judged, but all are freely led to identify themselves in the lived experience. The group of participants should be as homogeneous as possible within itself, if not for age or experience, at least for what regards intent and “media literacy”. If the group is pre-existing, that is composed of individuals who usually share time and space, the workshop process becomes an instrument of the group to tell of its identity and transmit its needs. On the contrary, if the group is formed ad hoc for the laboratory, a significant part of the process is that of creating identity. Following two examples from the point of view of group identity:

<

Immagini oltre il muro

Group already formed. There is already a definition of us.

Laboratory created at the start of a video production unit in a youth center in the West Bank. The participants were the already formed group of young people from the youth center who, through the workshop process, found an instrument of creative expression to counter the sense of oppression given by living under occupation.

<

I live in Melbourne now

Ad hoc group, to be formed on the basis of the issue. Long work of building the group, or individual actions.

Laboratory with Italian and African migrants in Melbourne. Being all participants individuals with a history and experience lived very different from each other, after a moment of common reflection it was preferred to proceed individually and each became the author of his own short documentary.

The self-narration

When it comes to tales of real life, an asymmetrical relationship of power is established between those who recover and those who have recovered. Even apart from the malevolent manipulations, those who resume have the power to rewrite the life story of those who have resumed.

When we talk about fragile categories or on the margins of society, how do we then come out of stereotypical and flattering solidarity, or ignorant and mystifying stigma? Our proposal is simple and radical: to restore control to those who are usually only shown, to claim a story for those who are routinely removed, confined to non-existence. The world, told by those who live it.

The aim is to create narratives that communicate what the participants in the process really want to communicate, in the way that seems appropriate to them; to produce social change or individual transformation through a direct video production process and produced from below.

<

Like a man on earth

One of the main self-narration projects developed by ZaLab is the one that led to the creation of the documentary “Like a man on earth”, the result of a participatory video course held for years in the Asinitas education center for Italians for foreigners in Rome.

What happens when participants in a participatory video workshop decide to recall painful moments of their life – how easy it is to become a migrant yourself, an asylum seeker or a refugee, whether you want to tell the reasons for the departure,the fatigue of the journey, that deafness of asylum? Thinking backwards is necessary to be able to feel at the center of your actual history. Feeling whole, having a memory in which one recognizes oneself, is a process that needs time. And when human beings think backwards, they think in terms of stories, and they are even more able to do it when the stories become narratives of themselves to a recipient.

In this sense, the collective use of video to reconstruct, reclaim and share one’s own story can have, for asylum seekers and refugees, a further significance compared to the realization of a free, unexpected and dignified audiovisual product: a meaning that we find in the process .

After a traumatic event, the narration of self risks and losing; some experiences are so dramatic that they cannot become memory. No matter how these are tales that – ultimately – make themselves, they, in order to be able to trigger, need a recipient other than us, to open up the possibility of narration. The absence of a recipient able to accept the story makes the elaboration of the experience difficult, if not impossible. The narration of oneself does not necessarily represent the possibility of completely simplifying a traumatic experience, but more often, the assumption of its irreducible singularity and the acceptance of its enigmatic character, of its inexhaustible sense – which however finds resonance and wealth in being thanks to the story tack stitched back in the experience and to be able to speak a word in a public space.

From writing to editing

Depending on the age of the participants, their degree of “media literacy” and familiarity with the audiovisual technique and the duration of the workshop, we can accomodate different degrees of group involvement in the laboratory.

The fundamental and unavoidable phase is that of writing. Sometimes it is possible to create participatory video-only laboratories (even though ZaLab normally does not do them because our approach is aimed at audiovisual narration). Usually we start a collective brainstorming phase on the theme and then focus on the ideation of the subject. We then move on to the choice of the protagonists and in conclusion the narrative development.

As far as this field is concerned, it is the shooting phase that is the most interesting to get involved in. Normally we organize the first shots within the group, then go out and film on the field. It is important to first ask about the problem of the social impact of filming and of their filmic rendering, and to minimize invasiveness. It is very useful to divide the group up into different roles, forming troupes composed of prospective sound engineers, operators and authors / interviewers.

The editing phase is more complex to carry out in a group and this is sometimes the responsibility of the trainers who share the process with the participants only during individual meetings.

The diffusion

If the group is an essential element in the constitution of a participatory video laboratory, it is based on a reference community. For this reason, a fundamental phase at the end of the workshops is that of the public screening of the films that have been made. We can derive many benefits from the public screenings since this is the moment in which the participants come out into the open and show their work to the people close to them. It is also a moment of collective reflection on issues dear to the community. It is the social nucleus in which there is a free and horizontal exchange that sees civil society as the protagonist.

“As we have dreamed of them, [free newsreels] we would like to see two hundred a year in Italy and we would like contacts, even if only informative, but precise, on how to project them, without fixed rules and everywhere – from the parish to the cell, to clandestine places”.

C. Zavattini, film diary

For this reason, as ZaLab we make all the movies that come out of participatory video processes available on-line and for free on our website, but furthermore, over the years we have created a civil distribution network, made up of about 500 cinemas, art-houses cinemas, social circles, cultural associations, widespread throughout Italy, which project our documentaries and become nuclei for the horizontal distribution of film format.

From the beginning, therefore, the multiplication of basic experiences, the dissemination of video-active cells on the territory and their networking are a substantial component of the diffusion of a free cinema, of a different kind of television and diffusion on the web.

What can really determine the growth of democracy and justice in global society is not the bare technical and commercial capacity of new media to reach every corner of the planet, but the real spread of skills and the possibility of responsible use of communication resources that the media themselves make available – tools that allow us to believe in the transformation of the global audience of passive spectators into a future plural society of conscious narrators, or at least to work seriously in this direction.

Participatory video: the workshop of ideas

A Participatory video is a shared audiovisual production practice. As a type of social action recognized by UNESCO, it offers instruments of expression to marginalized groups and normally excluded from the mass media.