June 26, 2025
Call for video submissions
Following the deliberation of the jury, composed of Rafael SM Paniagua and Paula Pérez-Roda, 17 videos out of a total of 118 submissions have been selected in the Bergamasca Call. The selected works will be catalogued, disseminated, and distributed nationally and internationally by Hamaca on a non-exclusive basis, and may be included in screening, research, or educational programs.
Among the submissions, the jury noted a timely interest in portraying human and social worlds in decline or extinction. Non-fiction works predominated, with a clear desire to preserve the vernacular memory of territorial, emotional, and socioeconomic transformations as the 20th century dissolves into the 21st.
The selection criteria focused on the strength of the works as aesthetic-political audiovisual artifacts and as cultural documents with a gesture of preservation and ahistorical potential, as well as their ability to resonate with the imaginaries, gestures, and overflows summoned by the figure of José Bergamín. The selected videos demonstrate pedagogical relevance, thematic depth and texture, formal incorporation of the vernacular, or a unique documentary strength. In relation to the figure invoked, the most notable "Bergamasc links" pertain to the worlds of childhood and to minor, popular, artisanal, divergent angles; to verbal materialities and vernacular speech play; and to the various processes of destruction and dispossession affecting cultures and communities.
The jury sought to activate an expanded understanding of the term "Bergamasco" that avoids reducing the vernacular to a philological or oral trace of what has been lost. The intention was to incorporate a diversity of video genres—some more essayistic or testimonial, others more fictional and/or experimental—that would reveal, directly or indirectly, the different ways in which relational braids between people, language/s, and memory can be woven. The purpose of the selection, and the shared direction of the chosen videos, is therefore to open the potential of “the illiterate” to contemporaneity, questioning the linear logic of History and the sanitized contours of social discourse around language, art, and culture—as well as neoliberal appropriations of the vernacular.
Read as a whole, these works do not define what a Bergamasc world is, but help to sketch, through the audiovisual, its atmospheres, its edges, and its possibilities.
