Counter-Information: Video-Nou / Servei de Vídeo Comunitari

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During the period in Spain known as the Transition, a group of young people formed a working platform that conceived of video as an experimental tool for political intervention and a social weapon of counter-information. This exhibition traces the trajectory of the Video-Nou collective and its subsequent transformation into the Servei de Vídeo Comunitari. Active in Catalonia between 1977 and 1983, the group challenged official narratives at a moment when the media continued to adhere to structures inherited from Francoism.

Embedded in the enthusiastic climate that characterized the early years of the Transition, the group developed a practice rooted in neighborhood and counter-cultural movements, educational processes, and urban struggles, positioning the camera as an instigator of collective debate and the reclaiming of speech. However, this initial impetus was progressively shadowed by disenchantment, exposing the persistence of authoritarian structures and the limits of political change. It was by inhabiting that tension with institutionality that their practice acquired critical density. Video-Nou’s transformation into the Servei de Vídeo Comunitari consolidated the use of video as a means of communication and in situ social intervention, where images are not an end in themselves but part of a process that includes their continuous return to and discussion within the community. In questioning the separation between senders and receivers, the collective exceeded and critiqued dominant modes of audiovisual communication.

Dissolving the boundaries between art, document and action, video is understood not as representation but as a tool and a relational field where images circulate and are negotiated and transformed, bearing directly on the production of the social.

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