In the film, which is a journey to the extreme ends of misery, moving images shrouded in a kind of fog convey the feeling of a thick and cursed dream, like a never-ending night. voices above them closed Each of these women tells a story that is both poetic and terrifying about their doomed lives. We see them waiting for customers alone next to ruined walls or in the forests on the outskirts of the city. In filthy rooms and tattered bunk beds. They prepare the drug, inject it and smoke it. They masturbate or have sexual intercourse. These are images of hell, or perhaps its front room. Along with these characters is d’Agata himself, who often appears as another punished and wandering body before his own target. There are times when it becomes difficult not to look away from the screen.
D’Agata was at the auteur and experimental film festival this fall short circuitThis film, which the French photographer and filmmaker turned into a movie, is being re-introduced in Santiago de Compostela. work in progress. There, he admitted that it wasn’t easy for him to see these images today either, although his reasons weren’t exactly the same as those of his audience. For this reason He never stopped working on the film, taking and adding new things in pursuit of a kind of perfect montage.an entelechy that will perhaps take shape during his stay in Istanbul in the coming months. Pompidou Center in Paris and plans to finish outlining this and other works with the help of members of the public who attend the workshops.
“Actually I have no cinematographic ambitions. I don’t want to make a good movie. Atlas This is just a tribute to the people who opened the doors of the night to me.”, he explained in a meeting with this newspaper in Santiago a few weeks ago. At close range, the photographer is the exact opposite of the feelings his film conveys. A warm, approachable and extremely kind man who lives by different parameters than the rest of us.
D’Agata puts injustice, pain and violence at the center of his work. And if he himself becomes the target of his camera from time to time, it is entirely out of empathy. Like the characters in his film and many of his photographs, he is a drug addict.Or at least it was until recently: Today he continues to consume, but in a controlled way, he explains. He has made his body a battlefield between pleasure and pain. She once again shares her vulnerability, just as she chooses to spend her life among the most punished on the planet. Reaching ‘highs’ with them facilitates this intimacy because “chemistry is the shortest way to reach unimaginable intensities.” She was beaten by drug traffickers and pimps and, like many other women who appear from time to time, was on the verge of losing her life. Atlas. “The theme of my works is violence. But above all, it points to invisible violence. The violence we don’t want to see. I want to force the viewer to be responsible. “Tell him this: This exists and we are complicit, guilty.”
From religion to punk
d’Agata’s life story is marked by the empathy radiated by her images. “As a teenager, I already felt the religious fascination of monks wandering around immersing themselves in the pain and darkness of the world. Then, when I was 16-17 years old, I changed completely. I became a vagrant, I became an anarchist, I became a squatter… I became addicted to heroin, I started living with prostitutes, I had no home. I left Marseille and went to London, where ‘jaco’ and spatand then to Latin America. There was always this Confusing politics with the intensity of street violence…When I was in the civil war in El Salvador or the revolution in Nicaragua, I did not go as a militant, I went to experience everything alongside the people on the streets. “Until I was 30,” he recalls, “I didn’t even know what photography was.”
His encounter with the target occurred when he reached it. new York and began learning and working with another artist associated with extremism, a photographer and filmmaker. larry clark. Today, he has published 62 photo books, and although he says he hates making them, he admits they are necessary “to build my path.” I’m slowly clearing up my conversation with them, the story I want to tell. It is a political and existential story, because constantly approaching death is a way of living with my body, part of my human condition.
The camera became not only his working tool, but also his way of relating to the environment; but his vision for this practice isn’t exactly the most widespread. “For me, photography is not about looking. What interests me is where you took the photo, where the place is. I don’t really care about the photo itself. I don’t care who did it and why. I almost understand it better when I see people taking self-portraits because they are using photography to confirm a location, an identity. I argue that photography is not something to be looked at or consumed, but to confirm my position in the world.” Therefore, he explains: “There is nothing psychological about my photographs. “I reflect the figure of a more or less neutral human being who is just trying to live.”
Whether in the crowded corridors of a pulmonology ward or in the darkest bunkers of Mexico or India, their philosophy is always the same: ‘Go where you have not gone and teach things that have not been taught.’”
In this fixed position between life and death, the environments in which d’Agata works are often marginal environments, places of conflict and war, and hospitals. He has been to Ukraine several times in the last two years. And just before During the Covid outbreak, he worked extensively in emergency services on the front lines of that battle.: “I took 13,000 photographs in two months and worked in hospitals in five cities of France. Then I went to talk about Covid in Brazil and the vaccination campaign in Madrid…” An 800-page book emerged from this. Virus. Whether in the crowded corridors of a pulmonology ward or in the darkest caves of a city in Mexico or India, his philosophy is always the same: “Go where you haven’t been and teach what you don’t know.” they teach. ”
It’s been a long time since he’s made a film, an art form to which he feels extremely sensitive, even as a spectator. He concentrates on photography, and although he continues to take drugs, he neither records nor takes photographs while doing this for three or four years. “It makes me sick,” he continues, “I’m overdosed on the incestuous process of filming myself this way.” His base, he says, is a small room in Paris, but his is a nomadic life, constantly on the move. He desires to have no work commitments in order to feel free, explaining that when he spends a day at one of his exhibitions or talks about his work, as he did with the journalist here, “it’s a step back.” There is so much effort to live that every time I take the time to write something or print photos, I betray the other effort, the effort to live that tragic but real life.“Listening to him, it becomes clear that his life only gains meaning when he places his body in those places and with those people, at the zero point of pain. He shoots with his camera in an attempt to record the pain that the world experiences every day. Unfortunately, it continues to multiply.”