Your name
Antonio Rodriguez
Place of birth
Guatemala
Place where you live now
Between Berlin and Guatemala
3 words to describe you
Not easy to avoid clichés... observer, questioner, critic
Why do you take pictures?
It is my personal way to understand my closest reality as well as a medium that allows me to suggest/submit an opinion about it
Where do you get your inspiration?
I get inspired by classic photography but mainly by literature and cinema.
Who are your influences?
A. Tarkovsky, L. Buñuel, W. Evans, J. Koudelka, P. Nozolino , L. De Lión, F. Kafka, A. Camus
What determines the subject matter you choose?
The subject I choose must be part of my close reality and affect me emotionally, in a way that allows me to develop an honest and transparent approach, something with which I am truly connected.
What impact would you like your art to have?
Obviously I wish that my artwork works as a device that gives visibility to the subject that I propose, also that my images become thought activators and generate new dialogues.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
Nostalghia (Tarkovsky), Teorema (Pasolini), Time Commences in Xibalbá (de Lión)
Is there anything you want to add?
Happy to be featured by you

Tacaná
Project statement

While visiting Guatemala a few years ago I metaphorically met my paternal grandfather for the first time. Without any reference to him, a familial secret is accidentally revealed to me: "the grandfather went into exile in Mexico at the time of Jorge Ubico's dictatorship (1930)". However nobody wants to talk about it anymore but four photographs that my family keeps together with an old Mexican migration ID, suggest a dissident voice from the regime imposed in Tacaná, his hometown. The discovery is strange and fascinating, like the old photos that I find in a Berlin antique dealer days before traveling to Guatemala back then: Journey from Germany to the Americas in Zeppelin by an unknown author, also taken during the 1930's.

Why does the dictatorship persecute my grandfather? Why is his ID defaced and damaged, the only one preserved by Guatemalan official records? What kind of violence faced him and his family? Those are what drives me (from my self-chosen exile in Berlin)and that mark the beginning of this reflection on the years of the forced absence of my grandfather, on the unknown which is idealized by recognizing a sense of belonging with it. Tacaná is a journey of encounters and divergences with the mutation of realities -own, alien and invented- sheltered in the self-censorship: the territory of the memory where one insists, in present tense, on observing the landscape from the air, the place where is produced the contradiction between being part of everything and nothing.

While flying back I did understand:
Photography, self-censorship and exile are all synonymous.

The three of them depict
the territory of memory
where one insists,
in present tense,
on observing the landscape from the air,
the place where is produced a paradox
between being part of everything and nothing.

antonio rodriguez
@tonirodriguezfoto