Comando Creativo is a collective made up of people who came together with the shared concern: creating a different kind of cultural, symbolic, and communicational work. We took on some challenges that our society seemed to be facing at that time. The making of a communal state and the structures of communal self"government became a central issue for all of our work. Early on, we attempted to build a narrative from the institutions which would give an account of a new way of understanding power, highlighting how the popular bloc was called upon to activate and exercise this power, without delegation and without mediation.
That is precisely why we committed ourselves to looking into new forms of communication that were emerging in the communal councils, such as the handwritten flipchart, the barrio billboard or the painted sign. We tried to take those forms of popular expression into formal, traditional institutional spaces as an attempt to change the existing paradigm. All this was done at a time when institutions were slowly beginning to shift towards a state with new power relations that would be built by the people.
A key issue for us was to consider how to apply participative and protagonistic democracy to the sphere of communication. We saw ourselves as catalyzers of sorts, and we took on the task of democratizing our communicational tools, so that organized communities themselves would be prepared to project their own messages. In that way, they wouldn't just be message bearers, but would rather become message producers. With this in mind, we organized workshops, we sought new ways to teach the use of stencils, silkscreening or muralism, all this with the objective of putting these resources in the hands of the people and particularly those involved in communal, self"managed forms of government.
Another central concern of ours was to look for new ways of relating what was happening in the communes. While it is true that the commune had a central place in the state media discourse, the ways of narrating this, in our opinion, fell short of what was really happening there.
In other words, there wasn't a narrative that was on par with the scope and implications of the fact that the people through assemblies and processes of collective decision"making would be exercising direct democracy and administering resources in a novel exercise of local power. Organized communities would now be diagnosing, planning, designing and executing public policies at the community level. In other words, there was a new power emerging from and by the people, but in the [state] media that story wasn't being told.
Finally, Coma
ndo Creativo committed itself to the collective attempt to build a new representation of the Bolivarian struggle. For instance, we participated in the construction of the bicentennial imagery [symbolism produced for Venezuela's independence bicentennial], which was a sort of manifesto of how Chavismo saw history, with a Bolivar with the sword drawn and [the whole project having] a continental sweep.
Utopix is a new project that we have launched. It comes from Comando Creativo and other collectives and individuals who gathered around the idea of reinforcing and deepening our work, understanding that conditions have changed. We are trying out new forms of production, we are experimenting with new formats, new media, and new technologies. We are also trying to achieve autonomy and be more self-managed. However, the aim remains the same: finding new forms of communicational production that are useful in times of social emergency.
If capitalism despite its increasingly socialized production, tends to privatize everything, then Comando Creativo seems to work in the opposite direction. Like Cha'vez and the Bolivarian Revolution, it wagers everything on the social and is committed to the common. Is that why it so often makes street art including murals, stencils, graffiti, and posters?
For me, the richest expression of Bolivarian culture and communication was in the street, public spaces, and the spaces where life in common happens. Additionally, I think they were the most effective. With the important exception of the Alo Presidente program, conventional mass media showed little ingenuity and a very limited capacity to convince. It had a narrow reach, and much prudishness" So it was the street that imposed itself not by design or by decree. The street earned its place as the most efficient space for circulating alternative discourses.
I talk about the street because that is where it happened in material terms: the graffiti on the walls, the posters, the banners, the murals. However, it is important to underline that what happened took place among the people. People became powerful communicators, with the contradictions that this brings with it, because when people themselves are communicating the barriers of mediation come down. But we are not going to go into that debate. Let's instead explore the very interesting consequences of this rupture.
First, as I said before, the privileged spaces for the reproduction of messages changed. Now the wall, a small radio transmitter, the communal council whiteboard, a handwritten flipchart, word of mouth communication, or the communal assembly itself became a means to communicate with greater efficacy and impact than conventional media. This deprived journalism of the aura of specialized work inaccessible to the common people the monopoly of communication. Public communication became a quotidian, widespread practice. Anyone could do it.
This also opened up a very interesting process of dynamic collective and collaborative authorship. It was dynamic, because the discourses in the street changed from one place to another, but also from one day to the next. A graffiti carried a certain message one day, but the next day there was a complimentary message on it or the message was turned on its head by a new intervention. Thus, our way of understanding communication in the Bolivarian Revolution begins to abandon those forms of one-way transmission used by the mainstream media and begins to demand conversation and debate.
Additionally, these forms of communication happened (and it is very important to highlight this) not only in a spontaneous way. They became massive thanks in part to the structures of popular organization that emerged with the Bolivarian Revolution. The latter problematized or questioned property relations in traditional cultural production. When you communicate, when you project a message in a place that is nobody's, this becomes everybody's. Suddenly, not only the large media conglomerates had the right to express themselves.
Obviously the contents produced under this new logic of property and circulated through new social relations had different qualities. I can give an example, which is what we experienced in Comando Creativo with stencils. Stencils became one of the preferred media used by the communal organizations to directly communicate, first because they were easy to produce, and second because they made it easy to massively project a message.
The only limitation of the format is the radical synthesis that it requires, and people were able to turn that into a strength, appealing to popular creativity. So the stencil became a sort of Twitter of the street. Brief and robust messages spread across territories, wall after wall, until they created circuits on a national scale.
Regarding stenciling, we dedicated ourselves to creating tools that would help to "democratize" the technique and make its use widely known. We designed manuals [see the manual here], distributed them, and gave workshops to more than six thousand people. We also designed open-format templates so that people could modify them. Other forms of communication that we tried to popularize include silk screening, mural"making, and movie forums.
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