research

Revista Visaje

In Cali 2012, a group of six programmers, filmmakers and researchers women started this virtual publication on cinema and cinematic arts. In Colombia only existed one magazine dedicated to cinema, Kinetoscopio, which we felt left outside a large plurality of practices, as well as the voices of young critics, filmmakers, and researchers. Initially, the project received the support of the Cinemateca of the Universidad del Valle. Since 2016 it has been working independently.
We have published six editions where we explore the relation cinema has with politics, gender, new technologies, and decolonial thought.

www.revistavisaje.co

I am interested in investigating self-managed forms of audiovisual production, and how these circulate massively, reaching unsuspected audiences. Poor images, as Hito Steyerl (2009) calls them, circulate feeding "both capitalist media assembly lines and alternative audiovisual economies. In addition to a lot of confusion and stupefaction, it also possibly creates disruptive movements of thought and affect” (7).

Self-managed popular cinemas

Since 2016 I have been working with filmmakers from rural areas and marginalised neighbourhoods in Colombia, who in the first decade of the 2000s began to make feature-length fiction films with very few resources and with the participation of their communities. Action films, gangsters’ movies, melodramas, and horror films that narrate local experiences and cultures with elements of Hollywood cinema and television. These films were widely distributed by pirate disc vendors on the streets of popular neighbourhoods and urban centres. With today's easy access to online platforms, filmmakers began to migrate to Facebook and YouTube and their films began to transform.

My doctoral research on this audiovisual field covers the following areas:
• Introduction: what are popular self-generated cinemas, why do they happen and who makes them?
• Chapter 2: Action cinema and narco-narrative as tools to narrate the Colombian internal conflict.
• Chapter 3: Melodrama and horror cinema as tools for updating the oral narrative.
• Chapter 4: Circulation of popular self-generated cinemas. From pirates and online platforms.
• Conclusions.

Published works:

González, Luisa. 2023. “Colombian Popular Cinemas: Expressions from and About Violence.” In Small Cinemas of the Andes: New Aesthetics, Practices and Platforms, edited by Diana Coryat, Christian León, and Noah Zweig, 325–46. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32018-7_16.

González, Luisa, and Suárez, Juana. 2023. “Making a Case for Piratas: Understanding the Complexity of Piracy in Colombia from the Vendor’s Standpoint.” Senses of Cinema, Cinema and Piracy, no. 105 (May).
https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2023/cinema-and-piracy/making-a-case-for-piratas-understanding-the-complexity-of-piracy-in-colombia-from-the-vendors-standpoint/.

González, Luisa. 2020. “Cines populares colombianos. La Gorra, un estudio de caso.” Nexus, December, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.25100/nc.v0i28.9942.

Pornography, morbidity, and webcam models

At the end of the 1980s and during the 1990s, emerged in Colombia a series of initiatives of porn film productions with VHS distribution. It was the first time that local bodies and landscapes appeared in pornography. Their coincidence with the rise and fall of the drug cartels in Cali and Medellín permeates these works and speaks about profound cultural changes in the country. Since then, pornographic (moving) images have not stopped being made and massively distributed in Colombia. The flows of a global economy that penetrates with dollars the local financial precariousness, is now accelerated through online platforms where sexual and erotic images are distributed.

This is a seed research that seeks to understand this audiovisual and sex work sector. Their struggles and submissions in the face of a capitalist and patriarchal system.

Digital images of the National Strike

In 2021 Colombia experienced one of the strongest protests in its history. Millions of people brought the country to a standstill for more than three months, demanding a tax reform and the implementation of the peace agreements, among others. State and paramilitary repression was brutal, but the protest and forms of struggle continued to grow and reproduce.

Online platforms were a key tool to call for the strike, denounce the crimes committed against protesters, and amplify the voice of the most oppressed populations. But soon forms of repression and censorship became part of the online protest scenario. Pro-government and pro-paramilitarism users became every time more present in the digital realm and platforms started to censor content and particular users. As a consequence, a lot documentation about the strike has disappeared from the platforms. However, much has been saved by activists, filmmakers, and collectives.

This is a research in progress that requires a great emotional effort to return to the images left by this complex episode in Colombian political history. It seeks to create memories, to generate narratives, as well as to think about possible forms of reparation and justice. It is an open chapter to which we will return collectively.

Published works

González, Luisa. 2024 (to be published). “Radios y Cacerolas: Feminist Approaches to Online Activism During the 2021 Colombian National Strike”. Feminist Media Histories. October, 2024.

González, Luisa. 2021. “¿Cómo sobrevivir en el chat de mi familia a las próximas elecciones presidenciales?” Revista Visaje (blog). Diciembre 1, 2021. https://www.revistavisaje.co/sobrevivir-al-chat-familiar/.

González, Luisa. 2021. “Internet for and against the Colombian National Strike.” Global Digital Cultures(blog). June 16, 2021. https://globaldigitalcultures.org/2021/06/16/internet-for-and-against-the-colombian-national-strike/.

González, Luisa. n.d. “Policías virales: Representaciones y autorepresentaciones de la policía colombiana durante la pandemia.” CEDLA BLOG SERIES (blog). Accessed September 2, 2021. https://secretariat803.wixsite.com/cedla-blog/post/policías-virales.