Transvoid

Com uma trajetória peculiar envolvendo longos períodos de tempo vivendo em um trailer no deserto ou com sua família em uma região isolada do Canadá, distante cerca de três horas da cidade maispróxima, Roderik se interessa em retratar pessoas que estão de passagem em estacionamentos, postos de gasolina, elevadores, nos termos do artista, em “não lugares ou desertos mentais”. Na série Transvoid faz retratos contundentes de pessoas que esperam em seus carros, por algo ou alguém, em cujo olhar impacta tanto a situação pouco amistosa quanto o estranhamento que é encarar um desconhecido.

Amsterdan (Holanda)

Some time ago, I started photographing people in cars, waiting at parking lots near supermarkets, shopping malls and gas stations, in several Canadian cities during the winter. These places, just like every other parking lot anywhere in the world, typically seem to exist outside of culture, history, and identity. They are passages, were people, by definition, will stay only temporarily. Usually, they are also areas of congestion, implying that, while being at such a place among many others, privacy, inevitably, can only be attitude at best. Today, many of these and many similar kinds of non-places (i.e. elevator, supermarket, metro station, lunchroom, shopping mall, etc.) can be found in every corner of the world.

They are all temporal circumstances. The coming and going continues endlessly. And while these are portraits, the people I portray don’t bear names. They are photographed in Canada during the winter or in Northern Chile during the Summer, but the circumstances are rendered invisible, as any direct visual hints of the surroundings are left out of frame.

When I photograph people waiting in cars, it is precisely the condition of a momentary suspension in transition, and its effect of hovering midair between the polarities of leaving and arriving, that creates an inner state that could be likened to a mental desert. Loss of place, loss of time, loss of body, loss of scale, loss of substance: these may well define the anatomy of travel.

Time spent waiting then crystallizes into a sphere outside logic – the void between point of departure and destination. As if the micro cosmos inside the vehicles exists independent from our normal, linear concept of the passage of time.

In TRANSVOID the vehicles become solitary domains in time and space.