Opus · Video Diary

The videos Rudolph Castro gathers during his travels through Latin America and Europe are the ‘B-side’ of the research behind his work. In these videos, the undisputed protagonist is unoccupied space, where the human figure is a mere footnote, a comment on the immense emptiness surrounding it. What Castro records is closer to the solitude in which we immerse ourselves as we move through unfamiliar spaces. This solitude is, in turn, cloaked in a familiarity that always feels strange. A universality in which figures, landscape and light appear as part of a continuum in the eye of the beholder. Thus, from the heavy skies of the Peruvian and Chilean Andes to the insularity of certain corners of the Argentine capital, through excursions into the night of Mexico’s Federal District or the subtle salt-laden wind of Europe’s seas, the story these videos tell is that of an uncertain, crepuscular journey. Like the archetypal flâneur of Benjamin and Baudelaire, Castro waits, laden with time, for the opportunity to consume his self-imposed solitude within these images.