In the valley of Chuquiago La Paz, Bolivia, Rosalía and Irineo transform clay daily into Gambote, a type of brick that they make following the gestures of a trade that almost no longer exists. The manufacture of Gambote is very different from the bricks of the industrial and post-industrial era. The camera directed by Sofia Bensadon follows their gestures as part of a landscape in time that seems suspended, in any case a time out of time. In this suspended time, during their labors, Rosalía and Irineo talk about the economy, the different tasks they are responsible for, the weather and the sky.

In the neighbourhood Brasil in the city of Santiago, Chile, Ana Luisa does not usually talk much, but every day she prepares herself and her salon to open the hairdresser’s that operates there. Every day, Tato arrives to work in that salon. In Peluqueras by Maite Alberdi Soto and Israel Pimentel Bustamante, Ana Luisa and Tato spend the day, between work, chatting and waiting like a silent heartbeat that weaves the daily routine. There are not many clients and time slips away between these women sitting in this hairdresser’s salon where, in addition, other neighbours come to watch the soap opera together. Outside, the neighbourhood lives and breathes at a different pace. The hairdressing salon functions as a counter-time, both personal and social, in which, at some point, Ana Luisa will decide to intervene.

A counter-time is undoubtedly the Thursday of comadres[1]. That day on which, every year, Andean women do not work, interrupting their duties to open up a time of sharing, enjoyment and celebration. This festivity, introduced in Latin America during the Spanish colonisation, was appropriated and re-appropriated by local communities and has found ways to be updated in contemporary times. The short film made by Wanda López Trelles takes place in San Antonio de los Cobres, Salta, Argentina, where on that day, women delegate their duties to men and join together singing, eating, sharing coca, dancing, ch’allando[2] la tierra. The couplet they sing together are a space of critique and subversion that point out ways of going against the grain and class consciousness, inequality in the distribution of wealth and as a way of celebrating their  bonds and life cycles.

The short films Gambote, Peluqueras and El día de las comadres, tell stories that may appear anachronistic and, in some ways, seem to put in tension the notion of capitalist labour that we have incarnated. In a basic and unpolitical way, the International Labour Organisation defines it as a set of human activities, whether paid or unpaid, that produce goods or services in an economy, or that meet the needs of a community or provide the necessary means of livelihood for individuals. This definition underlies any conceptual elaboration of labour in the Western imagination and is structural to the capitalist system. Even in the social-democratic perspective in which work becomes ‘employment’ with its organisation of income, rights and social protections each time; even in its contemporary forms where the divisions between work and leisure time become ever more blurred, and the levels of abstraction that sustain it ever deeper, the notion of work as a ‘productive factor’, of creation and accumulation of wealth seems to continue intact in a perspective of unlimited growth, even incorporating the stratosphere as a horizon of intervention. In the Andean cosmovision, the notion of work is non-existent. The verb to work is not part of the vocabulary of the Kichwa language. As a closer word, the Andean communities identify the verb llankana, which means to connect, activate, relate to something or someone. The tasks, trades, tools and what is ‘produced’ or carried out are in no way disconnected from communal life and vital relations with the environment.

Something of this conception seems to be present in the three short films that conform the programme ‘Ecologies of the Interstices’. This programme brings together four filmmakers from the Southern Cone of Latin America, mobilizing stories, characters and activities that approach work from the moments of disjuncture with current capitalism. In Gambote, as in Las Peluqueras or El día de las comadres, other logics underlie in relation to work, particularly linked, on the other hand, to the notion of trades but also to forms of temporal, social and vital inscription. These logics do not seem to be directly assimilated by the capitalist system, although they do not necessarily operate outside of it. They do not even appear as modes of denunciation or contestation. They function and inscribe themselves interstitially in the system. It is from these interstices that alliances are created and processes of construction of personal and collective subjectivation are generated, shaping unexpected landscapes of involvement.

[1] Comadres: godmother, friendship based in the spirit of sisterhood or sorority.

[2] Quechua and Aymara practice carried out in Bolivia, Peru, Chile and Argentina, consisting of moistening the ground or some element for which protection is sought with ritual drinks.