Creator’s Statement

I joined the “Reframing the Argument” workshop at the University of Notre Dame with a rather ambitious goal. Instead of approaching just one part of my research through videographic criticism, I attempted to encompass the entire project. Perhaps also because, in the process of finishing the last chapter of my dissertation, the topics contained in it were the ones that most obsessed me at the time—and still do, since I feel they mark the end of one investigation and the beginning of others to come. It was, however, hard to focus solely on that final part of the project, because I felt it was essential to frame it in some way, to place it in context and time, and to explain what I study and why. The previous chapters had led me to this point. A point that oscillates between imagination and possibility for the future, but that at the same time is charged with the past, which shapes the present and those possibilities. So, how to approach an entire dissertation through videographic criticism?

The different assignments of the workshop prepared us for this challenge. When we first introduced ourselves online, we did an initial exercise: find a keyword from our research and combine it in some way with an image. A very intriguing but successful activity as, in my opinion, an image may have much more impact than any “elevator pitch” in presenting my research topic (and in helping me remember those of my future colleagues!). It did not take me long to realize that one of the key words in my research is ruin, which in English is both a state and a process: a violent verb, as Ann Laura Stoler (2013: 9) points in her account of imperial debris. Alice Mah had previously coined the concept ruination (2012: 13) as an active, socially produced condition of deindustrialization in which material and cultural forces continue to operate in the present. In my case, I combined the word ruin with an image of a mining shaft tower taken from Elisa Cepedal’s film El trabajo o A quién le pertenece el mundo / Work (or to Whom Does the World Belong) (2019), which stood in for the letter “i” in the word. This tower is one of hundreds that remain as ruins of the coal mines in Asturias, the northwestern Spanish region where I grew up.

My dissertation, titled The Darker Side of Spanish Modernity: Deindustrialization and Counter-Hegemonic Narratives, explores the causes and effects of deindustrialization in Spain, which began in the 1980s and continues to shape several peripheral regions (such as Asturias, Galicia, León, and Murcia). Spain’s pursuit of modernity since the Transition to democracy in the late 1970s has silenced and erased the experiences of many inhabitants of these areas. These territories endure a material and symbolic ruination that reflects an identity crisis that intersects with economic, social, and environmental issues. Drawing on Gastón Gordillo’s notion of “nodes of rubble” (2014: 5), I approach industrial ruins not as static sites but as rhizomatic processes of memory that, through their multiple temporalities, create space for critical reflection and cultural imaginaries beyond nostalgia. To examine deindustrialization and its ruins, I analyze contemporary Iberian cultural productions and practices, primarily audiovisual documentaries and other audiovisual media, which remain peripheral to mainstream narratives.

Most of the documentaries I work with are experimental and performative (Nichols 2017), combining observational practices with highly constructed cinematic devices. In El año del descubrimiento / The Year of the Discovery (Luis López Carrasco, 2020) extended moments of listening and presence are framed within staged, mediated, and self-reflexive structures. Through archival aesthetics, embodied performance, and formal strategies—such as shooting in Hi8 analog texture, staging the action inside a bar with a 1990s aesthetic, or dressing participants in temporally ambiguous clothing—the testimonies destabilize the viewer’s perception of time, making it difficult to discern whether the images are archival or produced for the film. This ambiguity is gradually revealed as a deliberate construction, exposing the use of temporal layering to suggest that capitalist economic crises are cyclical and that little has changed since 1992, the year Spain presented itself as a modern democratic nation through a series of events such as the Barcelona Olympics and the Seville Universal Exhibition.

This video essay opens with archival footage of the labor struggles shown in this documentary, combined with the archival images of miners’ strikes in Asturias during the same period, collected in Cepedal’s El trabajo. The sense of historical dissonance shared by both films is further reinforced through the inclusion of the English voice-over from El trabajo, which represents the fictional figure of a foreign ethnographer documenting a workers’ movement in its final, desperate moments before the official closure of the mines in Asturias in 2018.

The split-screen structure shown in the footage from El año del descubrimiento, maintains the editorial decision that already structures the original film. Rather than functioning solely as a device of contrast, this editorial decision produces simultaneity: testimonies, archival images, titles, and everyday gestures coexist across the frame, and memory appears fragmented and ongoing. The video essay does not extend this device across different materials; instead, it retains the split screen only where it is intrinsic to the original footage, intervening elsewhere through alternation, temporal reversal, and rhythmic disruption. Together, these strategies resist a single focal point and invite an embodied, participatory mode of spectatorship.

The song “Sube que te llevo” by the Spanish group M.P.M., used in the credits of López Carrasco’s film, also serves here to highlight the contrasts and ambiguities of an era marked by celebration and crisis. This song is a classic of the so-called Bacalao or Mákina, a style of electronic music and a countercultural movement associated with the rave culture that emerged in the 1980s in the nightlife of the outskirts of Valencia, near Murcia. The movement, which reached its peak in the early 1990s, ended up becoming a tourist attraction throughout Spain, offering an escape for a generation trying to mask the realities of a present marked by deindustrialization and economic struggle, at a time when the future seemed to have suddenly and rapidly arrived in a Spanish state that presented itself as the new center of the world. It is precisely in this context that modernity began to be perceived as an incomplete project in a country where progress always seemed to stall, causing a “mismatch with modernity” (Aguilera-Mellado, Córdoba, and Sheean 2024: 5) that reflected on society and culture.

Having overcome the challenge of containing all this context in a first, frantic minute meant to emulate chaos and decline, I set out to move from that turning point to the ideas that conclude my research. What does remain in the ruins, besides nostalgia, after the end of a community and its ways of life? Through John B. Foster’s (2022) words, I introduce the concept of the ecological ruin related to environmental destruction. Although the author presents the disjunctive “ruin or revolution” (my emphasis), I found it more productive to think in terms of “ruin and revolution,” since ruins do not disappear but sediment as material and symbolic memory. As articulated in Paul B. Preciado’s (2025) statement, which appears at the end of the video essay (00:03:51): they are our past and present. At the same time, as rhizomatic nodes, ruins open revolutionary possibilities of alternative futures.

In the final section, I turn to cultural products that articulate imaginaries informed by queer theory and ecocriticism, envisioning communal and sustainable futures amid capitalism’s apocalyptic ruins. For the video essay, I decided to use images from Sedimentos / Sediments (Adrián Silvestre, 2021), a road-movie documentary in which a group of transgender women visit the ruins of an open-pit mine. This scene is combined with the audio and visuals of the video installation Materia Frágil, Becoming Immortal (2023) by Asturian artist and photographer Kela Coto. Designed as a two-channel, large-format video piece to be exhibited on the walls of a long, tunnel-like room, this work was filmed among the ruins of a former limestone quarry, where a constellation of queer bodies moves through the space and weaves relations of kinship and interdependence, opening imaginaries of life beyond the ruins of capitalist extractivism. Its setup, also characterized by a split-screen montage, creates a sense of visual openness and immersion, inviting the audience to actively reconstruct different narratives and conclusions. For this section of the video essay, rather than subtitling the entire voice-over, I chose to highlight some keywords. I introduce the words “Ruin” and “Revolution” to articulate and emphasize the idea that it is precisely from within the ruins that collective alternatives become imaginable.

In practice, the idea guided the editing. In this attempt to condense a dissertation’s scope into a few minutes of audiovisual material, I was compelled to privilege rhythm, juxtaposition, color, and visual resonance. However, some of the conceptual turns—such as the glitch that shifts from “ruin or revolution” to “ruin and revolution”—emerged from the editing table rather than from prior writing. The workshop assignments encouraged an approach to videographic criticism from a position that aims more to show than to tell, to suggest than to explain. Working evocatively and following filmic strategies as those used by these audiovisual works themselves, this video essay creates a space for each viewer to connect the different materials and develop their own narratives and conclusions. Allowing images and fragments of sound to carry the weight of the argument felt risky at first. However, it opened space for new questions: What forms of knowledge emerge when the viewer is invited to connect the fragments of several dissected materials in the editing program’s timeline?

Created at the 2025 “Reframing the Argument” workshop organized by Ariel Avissar, Colleen Laird, Matthew Payne, and Barbara Zecchi, in response to a prompt developed by Avissar and Laird.

References

Aguilera-Mellado, Pedro, Antonio Córdoba, and Jacqueline Sheean. 2024. “Introduction: Ruinas Modernas: Untimely Spaces and Multiple Temporalities in Modern and Contemporary Spanish Culture.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 25, no. 1, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/14636204.2024.2310883.

Cepedal, Elisa. 2019. El trabajo o A quién le pertenece el mundo. Freews, Chaytor Industries.

Coto, Kela. 2023. Materia Frágil, Becoming Inmortal.

Foster, John B. 2022. Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution. Monthly Review Press.

Gordillo, Gasón R. 2014. Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Duke University Press.

López Carrasco, Luis. 2020. El año del descubrimiento. Lacima Producciones, Cromagnon Producciones, Magnética Creative Lab, Alina Film.

Mah, Alice. 2012. Industrial Ruination, Community and Place: Landscapes and Legacies of Urban Decline. University of Toronto Press.

Nichols, Bill. 2017. Introduction to Documentary. Indiana University Press.

Preciado, Paul B. 2025. Dysphoria Mundi: A Diary of Planetary Transition. Graywolf Press.

Silvestre, Adrián. 2021. Sedimentos. Adrián Silvestre Films, Testamento PCT.

Stoler, Ann Laura. 2013. “Introduction: ‘The Rot Remains’ – From Ruins to Ruination.” In Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, edited by Ann Laura Stoler, pp. 1–35. Duke University Press.

Biography

Eva Álvarez-Vázquez received her PhD from the Spanish and Portuguese program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2026), where she also earned a Graduate Certificate in Film Studies. Her research interests revolve around Iberian Cultural Studies, Film and Media Studies, Gender and Queer Studies, Cultural Memory Studies, and Videographic Criticism.

Review by Isabel Álvarez Sancho, Oklahoma State University

Eva Álvarez-Vázquez’s video essay explores interconnected questions of memory, labor, and ecological crisis grounded in specific Spanish geographies yet resonant with universal concerns. It opens with the lively Bacalao track “Sube que te llevo,” set against images of street clashes between workers and police from Luis López Carrasco’s El año del descubrimiento (2020). Through split screens, superimposed text, and layered audio, the video essay expounds Spain’s 1992 paradox: celebrating global modernity while industries collapsed and a generation escaped into hedonism. The video essay frames this tension not as a closed historical episode but as a starting point for thinking about how lived experience becomes ruination. A wide pan of an Asturian mining town—from Elisa Cepedal’s El trabajo o A quién le pertenece el mundo (2019)—marks the transition from social conflict to the material landscapes left behind. The word “ruin” appears, forming the work’s central inquiry: “ruin or revolution?” The essay quickly displaces this binary, proposing “ruin and revolution” as a more generative formulation. Rather than choosing between revolutionary rupture and resignation, the work proposes that ruins and revolutionary possibility coexist. The video essay’s second movement develops this idea through shifting bodies and geologies. Adrián Silvestre’s Sedimentos (2021) introduces a group of transgender women exploring an open-pit mine, viewing the site with curiosity, critique, and humor. One of them even questions its status as something natural, a stance that resonates with Timothy Morton’s (2007) challenge to stable notions of nature. Their presence reframes the ruins as a space where inherited losses meet emergent modes of belonging. The work finally moves to Kela Coto’s Materia Frágil, Becoming Immortal (2023), where limestone terrains, organisms, and human figures share an outlandish visual field. Text fragments such as “new kinship” and “dissident bodies” evoke an expanded relationality. The bright colors stand in sharp contrast with the dark images of the beginning, while the whispered final word, “surrender,” serves as a counterpoint to the opening techno refrain, suggesting a willingness to inhabit the temporal and ecological conditions handed down.

What distinguishes this work is its refusal of both nostalgic mourning and complete rupture with the past. “Ruin and Revolution” helps viewers conceive of ruins as sites of ongoing negotiation in which social struggle, ecological vulnerability, and queer futurity converge. Without naming frameworks directly, it draws on Marianne Hirsch’s (2012) concept of postmemory to show how the residues of industrial life circulate among those who inherit a memory neither fully their own nor alien. Revolution here might invoke Fanny Söderbäck’s (2019) “revolutionary time,” that is, a temporal movement that ends the lineal/cyclical dichotomy, that neither forgets nor repeats. The video essay practices what it theorizes: editing, juxtaposition, and rhythm generate meaning without explanatory narration. Materials accumulate without extraction, revealing unexpected resonances between times, spaces, ruins, and revolutionary possibility. The grounding in some Asturian geography and culture—Cepedal’s mining town and Coto’s reclamation of extractive landscapes—anchors abstract theory in concrete material history. Younger generations do not inherit industrial collapse and historical paradoxes as fixed tragedy; they engage creatively with that inheritance, recognizing new forms of social and environmental consciousness that neither reproduce nor abandon the past.

References

Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. Columbia University Press.

Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Harvard University Press.

Söderbäck, Fanny. 2019. Revolutionary Time: On Time and Difference in Kristeva and Irigaray. SUNY Press.

Review by Elena Igartuburu, Universidad de Oviedo

This video essay represents a significant contribution to videographic scholarship and cultural memory studies in the context of Iberian studies through its innovative approach to Spanish deindustrialization. The work’s theoretical framework is particularly noteworthy: it moves beyond conventional narratives of industrial decline and reframes the relationship between ruin and revolution from disjunctive—ruins simply representing disaster or the absence of revolution—to conjunctive—ruins as sites of revolutionary potential. This shift—from “ruin or revolution” to “ruin and revolution”—is conceptually complex and generative, positioning industrial ruins not as endpoints but as rhizomatic processes that open revolutionary possibilities for alternative futures.

The video essay demonstrates how videography can build what might be called a “peripheral archive” of Francoist industrialization and its aftermath. By creating a tripartite structure that juxtaposes archival footage from experimental documentaries with materials from the queer road movie Sedimentos (Adrián Silvestre, 2021) and Kela Coto’s Materia Frágil, Becoming Inmortal (2023), the work creates a multilayered temporal and spatial montage. This approach mirrors the content it addresses: the ambiguous temporalities within the source films themselves become a formal strategy for exploring how past, present, and future collapse and intersect within industrial ruins, thus opening up their revolutionary potentialities.

Methodologically, the essay demonstrates sophisticated editing choices that privilege rhythm, juxtaposition, and visual resonance over conventional explanation. The choice of music creates an ironic sonic backdrop that heightens the contrasts between celebration and crisis, hedonism and despair. The decision to subtitle selectively rather than comprehensively in the final section invites active viewer participation in meaning-making, aligning the video essay’s form with the performative and embodied strategies of its source materials.

This work proposes a productive scholarly intervention by centering peripheral Spanish regions and connecting material deindustrialization to queer and ecological imaginaries in ways that activate conversations about communal futures beyond capitalist extractivism.

License

CC BY 4.0

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.