Ending the Culture of Fear Once and for All: Notes on NegraBlanca and Other Forms of Post-15M Empowerment

Abstract

NegraBlanca is the result of a community film project developed in Blanca, a town in southern Spain. To undertake this project, professionals from the audiovisual sector and anyone from the town that wanted to participate were invited. The film experiments with different ways of telling from the assembly of stories invented or remembered by the participants in the project. Recreating the experience of NegraBlanca, the authors reflect on how the climate of political and existential experimentation created by the 15M Movement has favored the development of processes of self-representation and collective empowerment. Faced with the machinery of official culture—which tries to translate all human activity into individual prestige or economic profitability—this other culture continues to find its communal, everyday, fragile but courageous spaces.