R O D R I G O V A L E N Z U E L A | Garabatos | Photography
The new series of works "Garabatos" by Rodrigo Valenzuela (b. 1982, Chile) shows black and white photographs inspired by Rodrigo Valenzuela's research on Latin American subcultures and the music scene during the dictatorship years in the wake of Operation Condor. Operation Condor was a CIA-led initiative that aimed to neutralize socialist aspirations in South America by creating a network of cooperation between military regimes. Through the use of archival images, magazines, and film, the artist isolates the movements of bodies from documentary images, creating a vocabulary of gestures that subsequently become sculptures that are photographed. Reminiscent of a hybrid between a museum and a theater stage, the photographs represent an attempt to replace the ideology associated with the museum as a place of canonized beauty and information with a more egalitarian and sensitive place of common knowledge or wisdom about life.
The title of the works, Garabatos can be translated as "scribble". Colloquially, however, a "garabato" is also an insult shouted in the streets or stadiums of Chile. Valenzuela is interested in abstract gestures that are part of a collective vocabulary, a desperate attempt to communicate, a movement of desire, or a class code. Insults belong to subcultures and are an important part of national identity; an insult is a mixture of pop culture, class and geography. Valenzuela has an interest in analyzing, through his work, the social responses to injustice and anger, especially considering that most Latin American countries at one time experienced very similar rules and assaults emanating from the ideology of American imperialism.
