Radical imagination and anachronism of images: free radio and community video in Spain

This essay presents the practices of community communication that took place in the 70s in Spain and Italy as experiences of pedagogy and of radical imagination. Anachronistic radical imagination is proposed as the learning offered to us by the set of various experiences of collective creation over time and based on past memory. It is a way to combat the limits of the imagination and current posthumous time (Garcés 2019). This radical imagination is not concerned with the representation of images, but rather stops on the constitutive nature of the imaginative acts that practical communities produce in society. The thinker Cornelius Castoriadis would define it as transformative institutions. 

The autonomous communication practices that emerged in the 70s and 80s in Spain have not been studied widely. In Spain, some mesocommunication practices characterized by their low cost and decentralized, local, plural, and social service nature (Gubern 1985), such as community video and free radio proposed paths alternative to the cultural and institutional horror vacui of those transitional years. Importing elements of Anglo-Saxon and European sociocultural movements, the experiences of Video-Nou or Radio Alice were based on the notion of a prototype as a pedagogical tool for social, local, and situated transformation, more than on artistic or communicative production. They would be “do it ourselves” practices.