With a Lower-case h

With a Lower-case h is the title of a documentary exhibition and film series which mutually complement and amplify each other. The policy — the result of a broken period of struggles, uprisings and revolutions — is the filmed and documented subject matter, not its theme. It is what is seen, heard, and read.

People become poetic when they become revolutionary. Phrases are made. Words are played with. Many quickly become obsolete in relation to the period in which they are encountered and, therefore, must be altered so they can keep on naming, so our wishes are fulfilled, akin to an incantation. Seemingly univocal nouns such as “democracy” or “luxury” take on new meanings when used adjectivally: “real democracy” or “communal luxury”.

Revolutionary poetry composition, the exercise of joining words to acts and vice versa, is always public. Every phrase gathered in this documentary exhibition was public at the time. We find them on shifting sheets, in bulletins, on newspaper pages, in proclamations, on posters, on banners carried for hours and tied to trees or lampposts, and in this show we have arranged them in a circle with images and sounds.

The excuse of ephemerides — 2021 marks one hundred and fifty years since the Paris Commune and ten since the 15M movement — has served to set off precious archive materials which invite another history to be discovered and is led by anonymous or unknown people. A history with a lower-case h rather than a counter-history, for it does not only mean to go against the grain, but rather to wholeheartedly affirm another way of life.

The documentary exhibition includes the 2015 work Before Our World Disappears, Let’s Write it (6'19") for the project A Noise Made, by María Salgado and Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, reproduced from Monday to Friday at 1:50pm and 7:50pm.