Docupaintings by Rodrigo Dorfman. Curated by Miguel Rojas-Sotelo.

On display at the Fredric Jameson Gallery, Friedl Bldg, Duke East Campus , Durham, North Carolina, till October 31st, 2024.

  From portraits of the Azteca dancers in Durham to the fabulations of the Nuevo South, TIME TRAVELERS OF DURHAM And Other Fabulations features 30 large-scale pieces showcasing alternative mythologies emerging from the Great Latino Migration to the American South. Most of the works consist of oil paintings on photographic paper, wheat pasted on wooden panels ranging in size from 6’x4’ to 2’x2, giving the pieces a raw materiality that echoes the construction materials and roughness used by most of the working-class protagonists featured in the series. Inspired by the liminal spaces in a chiaroscuro style, Dorfman, unlike past classical painters of the genre, invites us not to fear the darkness but rather be seduced by its creative powers.

As a documentary filmmaker, the work of Rodrigo Dorfman has been shaped by the experience of exile. Exile is a violent form of uprooting with traumatic and long-lasting consequences. In addition, Dorfman grew up amid an intense aesthetic-political experiment, that of the popular government of Allende’s Chile in the 1970s. For years, Dorfman has been building a visual archive related to experiences of exile; and for the past decade, due to the cultural emergence of migrant communities of rural and indigenous origin in North Carolina (the great migration South to South) his work has moved to participatory/ethnographic documentaries of this communities. Here, the deep South (of Chile) and the Souths of the other Americas (South, Central, and North) collide. 

For this, his first solo exhibit, Dorfman, merges photography, moving images, oil painting, and AI fabulations. The issue of representation is still at the core. Who represents this telluric movements of peoples? Which technologies of capture and display best convey such movements? How are romantic ideas of the other (migrant/indigenous) mediated and reconstructed in El Nuevo South? Why is it essential to bring materiality into the flattening of representation via photography and AI generative images?

On the one hand, abstract images derived from movement and light are related to ancestral ritual dances, which morph into bodily displays, full portraits, and then visual scenes based on AI imaginations fueled by the artist. Here the subjects are Otomí, Chichimeca, and Purepecha migrants in Durham who had completed a time travel of sorts. They look back (directly into the eye of the audience/camera) in defiance. These communities re-enact victory and defeat against the Aztecs, the Spanish, and the new Empire they inhabit, collapsing time and space. On the other, baroque painting, pastiche, deep contrast, and photo manipulation became a syncretic form of religious/profane practice in which the image is tortured and ripened, activating its materiality from within the visual —the result is what Dorfman calls a docupainting.

A fabulation is an act that involves invention. It consists of composing and telling stories like fables, myths, and epic tales. As a compositional modality, fabulation has been linked to such genres as magical realism and fantasy. Still, as an act of story-telling, fabulation belongs equally to the world of the literary, documentary, and visual arts. As an exile and migrant, Dorfman found in the cultural practices of Mexican diasporic communities’ bridges into his aesthetic interest in fabulation and myth (he publicly said that Cherán and Durham had replaced the utopian Santiago). Fabulist storytelling functions between the true and the false to capture the passages in between. According to Deleuze (1983), fabulations creates a people; the real character becomes another when he begins to tell stories without ever being fictional (70). Through the powers of the fake involved in becoming, the storyteller may create new ways of being in and attuning themselves to this world. Indeed, Deleuze speaks of fabulation in contexts where the conditions of subjects depicted are challenging due to colonization, racism, homophobia, exile, etc. In these contexts, documentary fabulation may enable the invention of new techniques of being in the world, which may facilitate life under challenging circumstances (Hongisto 2015).

Along with the Time Travelers series, the exhibit features excerpts from The Waiting for the Dead series (odes to the migrant celebrations of the Day of the Dead), the Fables of the Nuevo South series (with a dark Latino Gothic take on Magical Realism) and the After the Flood series (an attempt to salvage the personal memories contained in photographs transformed by flooding waters).

All works share a common trend. They reveal the secret of production in a reflexive move (a painting within a painting, a photograph in a photograph), bold and dangerous at times, fragile and naïve simultaneously. Dorfman lets the viewer break the contract (voyeur to participant) and, in his most revolutionary intent, connects poster making (the pasting of images in the public sphere) with a romantic and problematic fascination of indigeneity in contemporary times, with a brutalizing technique (oil, paper, plywood, wheat-glue) that bring a sort of materiality and an aesthetic of labor to the fore. 

Rodrigo Dorfman is a Chilean-born and North Carolina-based award-winning writer, filmmaker and multimedia producer who has worked with POV, HBO, Salma Hayek's Ventanazul and BBC among others. His films have been broadcast on PBS, and screened at some of the top international film festivals in the world. He has exhibited at the Levine Museum of the New South, Atlanta History Center, Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, MAK in Los Angeles, and SECCA in Winston Salem. His memoir Generation Exile was published by Arte Publico Press in May 2023. He is currently working through the Center for the Nuevo South with a team of Latino youth on Nuevo South Magazine, the first hard-copy Latino magazine in the South dedicated to telling the stories of the Great Latino Migration. TIME TRAVELERS OF DURHAM And Other Fabulations is his first solo show.

 Miguel Rojas-Sotelo is an art historian, visual artist, activist, author, scholar, and curator. He earned a Doctorate in visual studies, contemporary art, and cultural theory from the University of Pittsburgh. Miguel worked as visual arts director of the Ministry of Culture of Colombia (1997- 2001), and has worked independently as an artist, curator, filmmaker, and critic ever since. His areas of interest include decolonial aesthetics, subaltern studies, the global south, contemporary visual circuits, culture and power, hemispheric indigeneity, cultural politics and subjectivity, performance, and film studies. Rojas-Sotelo currently works and teaches at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Duke University and is the Director of the North Carolina Latin American Film Festival.