Alejandro Manuel Flores Aguilar

This project is about filming and producing a video archive composed of oral histories of former guerrilla fighters, and a short documentary that engages in dialogue with collective memory, social imaginaries of civil war, and the complexity of Guatemala’s history of violence. The oral histories are compiled as a repertory of video-portraits, in which participants become the narrators of their own experiences and open a critical conversation with the most common trends of representation of Ixil subjectivity in relation to structural and state violence. By building upon debates with the anthropology of violence, transitional justice, and memory, the project aims to problematize the eye of canonic representations in which Ixil history and their actors are flattened and depicted as minorized, lacking agency and engagement with local politics. Raised Gaze in Ixil Time: Towards a Minor History of War is thus an intent to produce a situated epistemology that raises the gazes of those who are not considered as subjects of history in the ‘Major History’.