(Santiago, 1982)

Based in the United States since the early 2000s, Rodrigo Valenzuela uses photography and installation to explore the fabrication underlying social representations. Frequently capturing structures and montages that result from exhaustive physical and manual labor, his images trigger reflections on otherness and invisibility. In his series Barricades (2017), Valenzuela photographs barrels and pallets in a set of his own making. The objects are arranged in a way that aligns them with a photograph that, as a backdrop, organizes them into a single image. By creating the artificial scene of a barricade, the work poses questions about the representation of social protests. Another exploration of the boundaries between fiction and reality, his video Maria TV (2014) records Latina domestic workers living in the United States: he alternates shots of women reenacting scenes of their favorite soap operas with their personal experiences of diaspora.