Drawing on surveillance footage documenting police violence during the 2022 and 2023 protests in Peru, Gestos para romper una imagen reflects on what can be done with such images. Could you tell us about the origins of the project?
The project arises from the protests that took place in Peru between late 2022 and early 2023. During those months, more than fifty people were killed in different regions of the country, many of them by military and police forces. Some of these events were recorded by surveillance cameras and later circulated through local and international media. A few months earlier, I had moved to Spain, and from that geographical and affective distance, I was constantly seeing these images through the news. The video that impacted me the most was the one that recorded the murder of Víctor Santisteban by police brutality in Lima. It was a very powerful image: you could see that the officer shot him from a very short distance. On the one hand, that image functioned as evidence of police violence; but on the other, I also began to feel that it conditioned the way we perceived that violence and related to it.
So I began collecting surveillance footage, trying to understand what these images showed and what they concealed. It was a very intuitive process, but it was also rooted in my own experience with audiovisual activism, where I questioned the role of images of social protest and the impact of their circulation in the media, as well as in conversations with friends who were going out to protest or working as photojournalists, and who at that moment feared for their lives. In Peru, as in many other countries where impunity has become deeply normalised within the state, killings committed by police and military forces in different regions have been a heavy burden for decades. And with the current Congress, that impunity for those responsible has begun to be reinforced even further. That’s why I was interested in asking what we can do with these images when their exposure doesn’t necessarily lead to action. The project was born from that question: how to look at these images without becoming trapped in their evidential reasoning, and how to intervene in them so that they might open up another kind of relationship with memory, violence, and the bodies that appear in them, without falling into morbid fascination or turning pain into spectacle.
Alongside the surveillance footage, the film navigates the city of Lima through images captured on Google Street View. What led you to incorporate this material, and what role does it play in the film’s exploration of memory and representation?
Throughout 2023, I was very focused on images produced by surveillance devices, not only CCTV cameras, but also systems such as Google Street View. At that time, I frequently returned to Harun Farocki’s ideas around operational images: images whose main function is not to represent the world, but to operate within it, driving actions and organising our relationship with reality. From there, I began navigating through Street View the places where the protests had taken place, while also returning to more intimate spaces: the streets where I used to march with my friends, the routes I took to school, the neighborhood where I lived with my parents.
I think this is where something deeply tied to memory emerges. I saw streets I recognised, but the images couldn’t show everything those places meant to me. There were memories, affections, and stories that didn’t appear in the image, although in some way they still inhabited it. In the film, these journeys function as a form of searching and returning. I wanted to explore the distance between a place and its representation, between what an image shows and everything it leaves out.
Throughout the film, your voice appears through subtitles laid over the images. How did this formal choice emerge, and how did you approach the writing of these texts? More broadly, could you tell us how the writing process interacted with the editing?
At first, I experimented with voiceover, but it felt as though my voice was placed above the images and the sound. And I didn’t want that. I didn’t want my voice to explain what was already difficult to watch. So I began experimenting with the presence of text over the image, also because many of the surveillance images that are part of the film have no sound: they are silent images. I was interested in preserving something of that silence, in allowing the images to enter into dialogue with more immersive sounds, and in allowing the voice to appear in another way: not as a voice narrating from the outside, but as a form of writing that breaks in, accompanies, and asks questions.
The writing began in a very intimate way, almost like a diary. At first, they were phrases that came out as a kind of outpouring in a notebook: questions, desires, intuitions that appeared as I watched those images. Later, when I brought those texts into the film, I began working on them in a more precise, more narrative way, considering not only what the text said, but when it should appear: before, during, or after an image. In that sense, the writing and the editing happened together. The text became a way of intervening in the rhythm, of making sure the images did not remain enclosed within their surveillance function, but could instead open up to other questions and desires.
The soundtrack accompanying the images seems to be entirely reconstructed. What ideas and insights guided you in creating the sonic landscape?
The starting point was the silence of the images. The soundscape wasn’t meant to restore a lost sound, but to establish another kind of relationship with them. On the one hand, I thought of the GSV images as images of the voice’s present. That’s why I wanted that present to have sounds that could come from the street: the birds that appear at the beginning, some voices, the traffic of downtown Lima. I wanted those first sounds to feel gentler, to introduce us to the everyday world of the voice. But at the same time, there are also computer sounds, clicks, and navigation movements, because it was important to remember that we were looking at a mediated image.
During that process, Cocompi and I began looking for machine-like sounds that could appear whenever we encountered cameras in the city, but also whenever the view within GSV moved. Coco began distorting those sounds, and a more mechanical texture emerged, as if the city itself were also being listened to by those devices. The surveillance images come from the past, but little by little, as the narration moves forward, they begin to approach the present. That’s why their sound becomes more immersive and darker, because of the nature of those images. At the most intense moment of the film, we looked for sounds that could evoke the protest, something coming from the demonstrators themselves, but also the violence of police gunfire. From the beginning, there was one very clear rule: not to use sounds that would make pain explicit. I was more interested in building an atmosphere of tension without turning suffering into an expressive resource.
At the heart of the film lies your gesture of intervening in and manipulating the surveillance images. Could you tell us how your reflection on these images evolved and led you to this choice?
Another image that caught my attention was one showing a police officer giving orders to arrest protesters as some of them jumped from the bridge. That video made me think about how the same image could be seen from completely different positions: by us, as spectators, and by the police, through their gaze and persecution. When Kamal Aljafari talks about going against the images, I began to ask myself how I could go against those images that disturbed so many of us, but also how I could go against the police gaze being constructed through them.
Instead of taking surveillance images as transparent evidence or objective records of what happened, I wanted to intervene in them, erase them, affect them from within their own materiality. At first, I did some tests by erasing certain elements in Photoshop, making some bodies opaque or almost imperceptible. Later, I began working with other erasure tools, this time focusing on the figures of police officers and soldiers. For me, that gesture wasn’t only a way of going against the police gaze, but also of going against them: against what they represent. It was very difficult for me to watch those images over and over again, but within the field of possibilities that cinema opens up, I allowed myself to imagine a situation in which those police bodies no longer existed, or had somehow been erased. That’s why I decided to record the interventions I made on the images, so that the action itself would remain visible, and also to make evident the agency of that textual voice that intervenes, tears, and erases.
In the epilogue, the gaze lifts toward the sky, and the film concludes with images of the stars and the cosmos. Why did you choose this final counter-shot, and what significance does it hold for you?
Fernanda and I found it difficult to decide what image could bring the film to a close. There was something desolate about that whole journey, and I think that feeling still remains. But we didn’t want the film to end in that place of heaviness. So we began thinking of an ending that could move almost in the opposite direction from the beginning. The first image is of the ground: a very earthly, very material image that somehow contains the core of the whole short film — the street, the bodies, the violence, the surface where things happen. But toward the end, we wanted to open another direction, to find an image that could let the film breathe.
As I was navigating through GSV, I saw that this possibility existed: to leave that plane, to look upward, to see not only the sky, but to see it from outside that three-dimensional space of navigation. For me, that image of the sky and the cosmos has something more evocative, something closer to a possibility of hope. After looking down, after passing through those images and confronting everything that happens on earth, lifting the gaze also becomes a gesture. Not as a way of escaping what we have seen, but as a way of breathing after having seen it; of opening a small space from which to keep resisting.
Interviewed by Marco Cipollini
