Los Diarios de viaje were audiovisual pieces produced for Festival Franco chileno de videoarte (1981-1992) that were presented as a visual diary of the experience of Chilean video artists in France and French artists in residence in Chile. These pieces can be understood as a unique corpus that sharply observed, with political insight and formal audacity, the difficult social and artistic conditions of the 1980s in Chile. This article argues that studying these video works may create a parallel space to the testimonial documentary production of those years. They establish their narrative operations centered on the self, where such documentary quality is constructed from an autobiographical approach, specifically in the modalities of autoethnography and self-portrait.