The Value of Labor: Rodrigo Valenzuela Interviewed by Forrest Muelrath
Rodrigo Valenzuela joined the UCLA Department of Art faculty in 2017. Valenzuela is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography, video, painting, and installation. Using autobiographical threads to inform larger universal fields of experience, his work constructs narratives, scenes, and stories that point to the tensions found between the individual and communities. Much of Valenzuela’s work deals with the experience of undocumented immigrants and laborers. At UCLA, Valenzuela teaches graduate and undergraduate students in photography.
Rodrigo Valenzuela, Afterwork #13, 2021, archival inkjet print, 20 × 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist. "The economy needs far fewer workers than it did in previous generations. By some estimates, nearly fifty percent of many US jobs are at risk of being automated within the next decade. When I first came across the work of Rodrigo Valenzuela, a Chilean artist whose films and photographs often deal with labor themes, the record-high unemployment and an increasing reliance on technology brought on by the pandemic placed the often staggering statistics about the future of work in the front of my mind.
Primarily a photographer and filmmaker, Valenzuela creates many of his images by constructing sculptural objects out of found material and then photographing them. For example, the black-and-white photogravures I saw in his exhibition Stature at Asya Geisberg Gallery in New York City in late 2020 were created by casting plaster in discarded consumer packaging. However, without the wall text, I may have only seen obsolete machinery from woodshops or farms. When I found Valenzuela on Instagram and saw his photographs of new work “for a post-worker world,” I knew that I wanted to talk to him.
—Forrest Muelrath
Forrest Muelrath
I was drawn to the Instagram post you captioned “Post-worker world.”Rodrigo Valenzuela
It’s something I chose as the work has been drifting more toward science fiction. I never really liked science fiction, but I’m growing to like it more. I really love cinéma vérité and filmmaking that is attached to real life, like Carlos Reygadas in Mexico City, Lucrecia Martel in Argentina, or the Dardenne brothers in Belgium—very realistic cinema that deals with working-class issues. But nowadays it feels like the only way to imagine an alternative to capitalism is through sci-fi. In the real world there doesn’t seem to be a lot of room for metaphor, whereas in science fiction it’s easier or possible to imagine a world where you can point out the problems of our neoliberalism. When you see that things are being made by hand, you can tell there are flaws; but you can also tell that there is intentionality in the flaws. You can see in my work that there are a lot of problems, but the problems also make it unique. I think understanding the value of labor has been a problem for a long time in contemporary society; it is especially a problem for people who have a lot less power. This gave me the idea for my video The Unwaged (2017) and also the project I’m currently working on." — Forrest Muelrath, July 6, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the BOMB website.
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