[Conflicte] no és el mateix que [Abús]

Screening of El jurado by Virginia García del Pino and conversation with Laura Macaya

Feminist criminologist Tamar Pitch tells us that in contexts where the culture of punishment and punitive approaches to social problems are strong, "the solution constructs the problem". The necessary existence of the penal system and the culture of punishment, in order to preserve the interests of neoliberal rationalities, shapes our understanding of sexual violence: what the phenomenon consists of, who its victims are, what they need, who their perpetrators are, and what actions we must take to combat them.

In Virginia García del Pino's The jury, the truth is just a group of pixels, the result of a digital zoom on blurred faces. The camera that films the members of a popular jury, facing a murder trial, is as lost as they are in the labyrinth of evidence, images and testimonies, incapable of filming anything but its own decomposition. Virginia García del Pino is a non-fiction filmmaker and project director of the Master's in Creative Documentary Filmmaking at the UAB. Her videos arise from an attempt to understand the world from a less painful point of view, gravitating around the social conventions of representation, and it is surely in this attempt at understanding that she tends to opt for a forceful formal simplicity.

While the screen, projecting The jury, works as a reflection of a group of civilians instigated to establish a sentence, we will talk with Laura Macaya about anti-punitivist feminism, the notions of conflict and abuse, the politics of cancellation, the penitentiary system and her reflections on violence and the possibilities of reparation. What does the striking increase in coercion and punishment systems, which are the main perpetrators of violence and discrimination against the poorest and most stigmatised people, say about our societies? Why, in a context that is supposedly more sensitive than ever to sexual violence, do we continue to witness the criminalisation of the most excluded victims? What does it say about our feminist movements that our demands are related to the reinforcement and legitimisation of the state and its "iron fist"? Who are we benefiting from all this? Can we allow ourselves to continue to be instrumentalised to legitimise a system of pain, exclusion and death towards our comrades who continue to be repressed and persecuted? In the face of the rise of the extreme right, can we continue to produce hostile, uninhabitable and asphyxiating contexts in our political and affective communities through the use of signalling, expulsions and cancellations? Are we reproducing bourgeois retributive justice? Is revenge a transformative political tool? What subjectivities and destinies of self-affirmation and desire is this punitive increase leaving us, women and sexual dissidents?

And the great unknown... what do we do then? Where do we start? Where do we go from here? Where do we want to go? Where do we want to head? Tackling these questions implies maintaining a complex, transformative and open view, open to mistakes and successes, but, above all, it implies daring to get hurt and to make it worthwhile.

By Hamaca

With the participation of Laura Macaya

Laura Macaya is an anti-punitivist feminist activist, anarcho-syndicalist and abolitionist of the penal system. She is dedicated to direct care, the design of accompaniment methodologies and the development of public policies to address gender-based violence from an intersectional perspective and restorative justice. She has also dedicated a large part of her professional and activist career to defending the rights of sex workers. She has written several articles in the press on the perspectives of anti-punitivist feminism, the vindication of women's moral and sexual infringement and against sexual hyper-regulation. She is the author of the book Esposas nefastas y otras aberraciones. El dispositivo jurídico como red de construcción de feminidad, she has participated in the collective work Putas e Insumisas and is co-editor of the book Alianzas rebeldes. Un feminismo más allá de la identidad (Rebel Alliances. A Feminism Beyond Identity), published by Bellaterra. She is currently a member of Genera, an association for sex work rights and in defence of sexual and gender rights and freedoms (https://genera.org.es/)

Tuesdays of video 2023 builds on the proposals of: