Rodrigo Vergara

In the ash-soaked images of Chilean filmmaker and photographer Rodrigo Vergara, a critical substance emerges from latent states. Collisions and ruptures permeate seams of reality – doors, roofs, even the hide of a horse, become canonical figures. What is absurd gains a leverage of permanence. Within Pablo Neruda’s ‘Suddenly, A Ballad’ from Memoirs from the Black Island, a novel entity emerges from an ash bed, coercing a sacred effect: “Something is born in the depths of this, that was once ash, and the cup trembles with red wine.” One begins to believe that Vergara assumes such a role, observing in excelsis the consequential and once interrupted acts of mankind and its greater earthly mother.

“There’s a small fracture in things that makes them real—like spotting a typo in a text, a kind of bump that pricks us, like a needle forgotten in the bed. My work emerges from something close to that error, a capture of the unexpected. We live in a world full of human decisions that the internet can’t grasp, and that’s where I focus my energy: on everyday surfaces, moving through cities and the abandoned towns of Latin America, marveling at the ways we invent to solve our problems—the creativity of my neighbors, the rage that makes us want to burn it all down, the latency of a life being lived, of a past that exists and that we can mold, to shape images like clay.

And isn’t it fun to play with clay? Though we have to be careful—when you mix the colors too much, all you’re left with is a dull gray mass, stripped of character.” – Rodrigo Vergara

<> RODRIGO VERGARA is a Chilean filmmaker and photographer. At eleven, his father taught him how to use a Zenit 12XP. He shot his first roll photographing friends perched in trees. He never saw the images, but a couple of them stayed etched in his memory. He deepened his practice in photography while studying film, and has worked as a lighting technician across different corners of Chile. Along these travels, he’s developed a personal relationship—expressed through analog images—with spaces in constant transformation. In 2023, he published his first book, Hotel (Ediciones La Visita). He has contributed as an editor for Revista Oropel and is currently working on his new photobook, Hasta acá llegaba el mar.

ADF: How do you encounter architecture and the form of the city as a kind of resistance? In your images, there seems to be a tension—a dissonance—between what should exist in order, and how it nevertheless survives in a chaotic state. There also seems to be a correlation between the sense of belonging and systems of forced habitation. I’m thinking of entrances, doors, signage… what do these elements mean to you?

RV: What is out of place is a form of resistance against the homogenization of our planet. Observing elements that don’t belong is mainly a way to preserve a connection with what is real, with what exists as a human work, a fracture, a chaos. Humor is also important in my wandering; many times, I laugh first and only afterwards make the image. It’s a bit like how I see life, how I reflect myself in my surroundings, and how I build my own personality from what is right in front of me. I like the idea of a ‘forced room’ and the way you approached the image of the entrance with the door. For me, it feels natural, it’s my childhood, watching my mother build a home with whatever was at hand, with great creativity. I think about my need to portray Latin America from a perspective that is both chaotic and playful.

Notes

(1) The photograph of the burned bank is significant because the building behind it is the Instituto Nacional, the oldest high school in Chile, where both Presidents and revolutionaries have studied. Young people demonstrate there every week against the injustices of this country.

(2) As for the burning building, I couldn’t explain it. I was simply on my way to work when I came across a crowd staring at the sky. I turned around, saw the flames, quickly pulled out my camera, and took the picture.