If the market plaza was my first laboratory for recognizing the other, Acción documental de una obra emerged as a direct response to the ethical crisis that process opened.

Context

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​​After months of attempting to photograph vendors, porters, sex workers, and peasants displaced by urban renewal, the camera ceased to be merely a tool. It began to resemble a weapon: aiming, shooting, capturing, archiving. While the academy demanded evidence and documentation, the body began to doubt that mandate, at the same time immersing itself in nightlife culture as a VJ, skater, and cultural activator.

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Caught between academic pressure to “produce a documentary” and the moral discomfort of continuing to inscribe others into an archive they do not control, Acción documental de una obra emerged as an act of escape. Presented at Imagen Regional 7, curated by Viviana Ángel, the work marks a decisive shift: it is no longer about representing a reality in crisis, but about placing the very status of the documentary in crisis.

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Here, the boundary between showing reality and inhabiting it through the body collapses.

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From Cinema to Live Cinema

Archive, mediation, and real time

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Live cinema appears as a recent term for a practice with deep historical roots: audiovisual experience in real time as ritual, event, and direct mediation between body, image, and audience. Its genealogy extends from shadow theatre and the magic lantern to expanded cinema, video art, VJ culture, and contemporary digital interaction.

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From its origins, cinema functioned as a technology for mediating the world. Through montage, it organized time, domesticated experience, and produced meaning. Documentary film, defined as the “creative treatment of reality,” does not merely record—it interprets, directs, and constructs ideology.

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Critical traditions—from Benjamin to McLuhan, from Adorno to Debord, and more recently Manovich—have demonstrated that every image technology is also a technology of power. The camera is not neutral. Editing is not innocent. The circulation of images produces social reality.

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With the digital shift, the image becomes portable, immediate, ubiquitous. The time between recording and displaying nearly disappears. Flow replaces delay. In this context, live cinema is not a technical refinement but an ontological rupture:

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• Classical cinema is reproduction.

• Traditional documentary is archive.

• Live cinema is event.

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The image no longer advances toward a narrative conclusion but enters a suspended temporal regime: loop, repetition, variation, expanded duration. The audience ceases to be a passive spectator and becomes an inhabitant of the dispositif. The interpreter becomes visible as an audiovisual performer.

If documentary sought to show reality, live cinema proposes inhabiting it.

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The Dispositif

Inhabiting the image through the body

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The dispositif of the work is technically restrained yet conceptually radical. Twelve translucent white mesh rectangles form a permeable cube. A video projector casts a live-streamed camera feed onto this structure, processed in real time through editing software.

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Motion sensors translate the audience’s movements into editing parameters: distortions, overlays, rhythms. The projected image is produced by the very bodies that inhabit the space. The audience edits itself in real time.

Inside the cube, a monitor displays the image of a beating heart and brain, as if the technical organism itself were alive. The work is not organized around a predefined narrative but functions as a sensitive system responding to presence and contact.

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There is no finished work. No clear exterior. The piece exists only as long as the situation exists. The document is pure present.

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The Counter-Archive

Renunciation, politics, and event

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At this point, a decisive inversion of documentary practice takes place. Where classical documentary records, edits, and archives, Acción documental de una obra voluntarily renounces the document. There is no final film, no central archive, no stable object that can circulate as cultural commodity.

This is not a technical limitation but an ethical and political decision.

The work is presented at the Banco de la República in Pereira, an institution directly implicated in the same urban renewal process that displaced the market plaza. A former vault of financial power becomes the stage for a work that refuses storage.

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Confronted with a city that attempted to erase bodies, practices, and memories, the piece generates a form of archive that cannot be confiscated, patrimonialized, or commodified—a counter-archive that does not accumulate but resists through the event itself.

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Authorial Position

From recording to event

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Ethically, the work responds to the wound opened in the market plaza:

How can one look at the other without turning them into raw material for an archive they do not control?

Here, the other is no longer “what is photographed.” They become an active presence within the system. The authorial position shifts: no longer the authority deciding what enters or exits the frame, but a mediator who designs a condition and accepts the loss of control over the outcome.

The image ceases to be capture and becomes relation.

Three tensions irreversibly traverse this practice:

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• The image as relation, not object.

• Recording as a political act, not neutrality.

• The author as problem, not guarantor of truth.

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After the Document

The documentary as experience

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Acción documental de una obra does not offer a closed theory of documentary practice. It inhabits its crisis materially. Where classical documentary promised to fix a truth of the world, the work proposes another form of truth: that of shared experience.

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A documentary that is not preserved, yet leaves a trace.

A counter-archive that does not accumulate, yet resists.

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