LaTele.Cat (2004 – 2012)

When I was 19 years old  I got a job at a local TV near Barcelona filming and editing sports news.  After learning the basic skills of TV reporting  I also realize how the constraints of TV narrative (voice over, types of shoots, timming) barred communication itself.  (what later I discovered filmmaker Peter Watkins calls the monoform.

During my first year in J-School in the Autonomous University of Barcelona, a professor in Communications Theory talked about a project in Barcelona  willing to break those  boundaries. A TV not owned by the state or private companies, but by the population itself and their freedom to express themselves. I began to attend the meetings of the embryonic meetings of what later become www.latele.cat .

LaTele.Cat became my second school and family. LaTele is a collective horizontal project and one of the only citizen TV’s that has been able to broadcast in TDT in Europe. It’s a TV of the social justice movements in Catalonia, owned by individuals and social justice organizations.

At LaTele we learned by doing, from broadcasting from an antenna to uploading the first videos to Youtube and Blip Tv in 2005.  Little by little  LaTele has grown its potential being able to produce many kinds of programs, from news, to vegan cooking, to the first PUNK  TV Program of the history of TV.

One of my lasts collaboration with LaTele, was producing this special Live Streaming from our DIY Studio: we connected with activists in Rio de Janeiro for the Rio+20 Summit in 2012. We used open software to stream to the world and we discussed with activists the ecological crises and the new trends in the so called green economy.

(For the broadcast we used the open network Xarxa Sense Fils with a temporary antenna we put in the roof of our neighbor. This allowed us to send the signal to our digital antenna on the top of the city and we also used Open Streaming software  Gisss.tv to broadcast online).

“Water Program streaming Rio +20. LaTele.Cat i Ràdio Bronka”

Resum Matrius Verdes (Programa de L’Aigua a LaTele.Cat) from webDOCC on Vimeo.

[CATALAN, SPANISH. ENGLISH all mixed]