Cinefòrum Poble Sec as a “school” for the commons: a situated device versus modes of address

During the 20th century, cinema and critical pedagogy shared discursive and practical topics in many forms, which pointed towards constructing an alternative public domain, aimed at social emancipation and exercising radical democracy. The “art of seeing”, theorised by Manuel B. Cossío in 1879 and practised by the film department of the Pedagogic Missions between 1931 and 1936, was the epitome of this space, boosted by both points of view, through which the projection room became a school, and look and words became tools for an autonomous learning.

However, the feminist educator Elizabeth Ellsworth (2005) questioned such pretensions at the end of the century ?essentially, confidence in communicative dialogue? by “reading through” the film concept of “modes of address”: neither a film nor the curriculum can accurately understand the wide-ranging positions of the public or students, and as such, their power is always paradoxical. Given the lack of accuracy in the former, the learning event specifically resides in feeding back subjective and “de-essentialising” identity differences.

All the same, this article explores how the Cinema Forum of the Poble Sec Assembly became a space for learning from January to July 2012 after the 15-M Movement, away from the discursive idealism of critical pedagogy, but also from the modes of address analysis. It considers that the device, located in the neighbourhood after an assembly practice, was based on a logic of care (Mol, 2008), which covered both the film screening and the debate that followed. Thus, in this experience, non verbal and technical common politics, understood as a shared condition of precarity (Butler, 2010, 2012), carried more weight than the assymetry of positions, placing the spatial-temporal differences of each session beyond an array of social distinction.