Invading Mina Yanacocha

The trappings of power can often be seen in the things and peoples that are silenced; internal contradictions in logic and morality become salient when a hegemonic silence (on such things as racism, sexism, injustice) is broken. The communal silence that is erected and upheld by private and public institutions does not rely on an obvious form of coercion, but rather it is socially shared. “If you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all” has become a cultural form of censorship—shoving the unruly excess of meaning that resides outside of institutional enclosures into a nice, neat box.

The guerilla filmmaker has a tool that is on its own silent, but with the technological advances in synch sound over the past fifty years, has verbal capabilities. How do you combat institutional silence—that denial of the excess, that inability to confront what is before one’s eyes—with a device like a camera? You turn the lens back on the institution, and reveal its own exterior, which then might just penetrate.

Peru’s Mina Yanacocha, the largest gold mine in South America, originally filmed in silence: