Vicente Didier
Immersive Realms
Creating new worlds through immersive storytelling
Email: vicente.didier@gmail.com
"The goal is not to produce a "true" picture of the world, but to produce empathy and expand human solidarity. From this point of view, ethnographic data can be seen as giving poetic expression to the voices of other cultures or the margins of one's own in a cosmopolitan conversation of society." (Rorty, 1989)
Ethnographic
capsules
Revolutionary
Ruins
(2018-2022)
Revolutionary Ruins is a series of three ethnographic capsules in two cities in Chile: San Bernardo and El Belloto.
The videos aim to explore the affects surrounding the infrastructure left behind by unrealized political projects. The current life of a certain materiality built for a future that never arrived.
It also explores memory, reveries and grief as the trumping of said future was the coup d’etat and the following dictatorship.
Episode I: La Maestranza de San Bernardo
Episode II: Social Housing Factory KPD
Episode III: Death, Memory and Counterrevolution at Cerro Chena
(English subtitles available in the above video)
Non-fiction
Kuträl (2019)
A medium length film that explores the challenges, possibilities, conundrums and texture that indigenous Mapuche artists have to navigate in thinking about their individual and collective identities.
It follows the performances and interviews of three contemporary mapuche artists:
David Aniñir: Poet and performer, born from the first generation that arrived from the Wallmapu to the capital
Paula Baeza: A feminist performer who critically recreates the way in which indigenity is presented a museums.
Fernando Raín: A jazz musician who has only recently gotten in touch with has mapuche roots and has been slowly incorporating elements into his music.
Based on the homonymous book by Mapuche intellectual Claudio Alvarado Lincopi, this film-essay explores the untold Mapuche story of the Chilean capital, Santiago.
“Mapurbe” is a term that urban Mapuche have coined to express their identity beyond its roots on ancestral territory, reclaiming the consequences of the massive rural-urban migration of the 1940’s.
The suffix “kistán” makes reference to a catastrophic Chilean imaginary of countries in Central Asia. Countries marked by ongoing conflict and violence.
The film aims to reveal this elements through three main audiovisual resources: archive, performances from contemporary Mapuche artists and interviews to key characters from the past and present history of Mapuche life amidst the capital.
Mapurbekistán
(Work in progress)
About the artist
My main concern as an anthropologist and artist has always been to find tenderness and kindness even in the most obscures domains of society.
I have worked as a makeup-artist in mortuary houses, doing ethnography with memory associations, dispossessed tutal and indigenous communities amongst others.
This has meant sharing with bereaved families, visiting abandoned heritage torture centers and many other places of pain and grief.
I hence adscribe to an aesthetics of radiance and lightness that aims to provide empathy, distention and joy.