VIDEO NATION, (UK / Reino Unido) BBC As camcorders became cheap and easy to use in the 1980s and ‘90s, amateur or home video recordings became very popular. In 1993 Chris Mohr and Mandy Rose of the BBC’s Community Programmes Unit founded the Video Nation project. Fifty people across the UK were given Hi-8 camcorders and training and recorded aspects of everyday life during the course of a year. During Video Nation’s first decade, ten thousand tapes were shot and 1,300 shorts were screened on TV. Video Nation followed the precedent of the Mass Observation Project launched in Britain in the 1930s, which focused on the observation of the working classes’ everyday life, generating alternatives to the then dominant media representations. The main feature of the Video Nation project, which set it apart from the “reality tv” format, was that camcorders and training were given to participants who wanted to record their own video-diaries and join public life as political subjects in their own right. The project migrated to the web in 2001 and continues today in a new format as Video Nation Network, an archive where all the recordings that were screened may be accessed for free.
Proyecto Mutirão. Graziela Kunsch, Sao Paulo , Projeto Mutirão is an open-ended dialogical research process that exists solely in the form of ‘excerpts’- conversations, lectures and classes depicting the collective production of a city. The starting point for these verbal exchanges are single-take videos that investigate the ways in which self-organized cities are generated. The videos, shot by Graziela herself, document her political involment in struggles for free housing and transportation and other issues in Brazil. [In Portuguese Mutirão (from the Tupi-Guarani word moti’ro), translates as a gathering of people who assist one another during the harvest or work together on some other common goal. In Brazilian Portuguese, the term is used to designate mutual assistance collectives that work for some common goal; it may refer to communal agricultural work, or to a popular construction method whereby neighbours get together to construct their homes, and assist one another exchanging work days through a rotation system that functions without wages or hierarchies. The term has been expanded to designate collective initiatives of participatory mutual aid or community work: a mutirão to paint the school, to clean and fix the park, etc. The original Tupi-Guarani notion of mutirão has equivalents in other indigenous communities in Latin America: minga in Colombia, Perú, Ecuador, Chile, Paraguay and Bolivia; or yanama for the Wayuu communities in Colombia and Venezuela. Cooperative work was also a typical African pattern in the rural black communities in Brazil, linked to Yoruba, Dahomean and other African traditions.]
