My body of work uses photography (digital and analog) and video to pair two states of a place, the idealized and the actual, and attend to the transition between them. Through intermedia compositions featuring fire-altered prints and collage, I approach ever-changing more-than-human realms literally, as they transform at the hands of anthropogenic ecological degradation, and figuratively, in the ways they live in the memories, stories, and traditions of the humans who know them. As I acknowledge the disorientation of coming of age in the Anthropocene, my visual art has become an embodied praxis in service of integration between what Barry Lopez terms “external” and “interior” landscapes.
Numerous scholars from cultural geography, environmental history, and literary and visual studies have shown how Edens, particularly in the Caribbean, served as rhetorical devices and visual motifs for justifying and obscuring the ecological degradation wrought by colonial and imperial regimes. After years of studying intensifying environmental crises and observing the pronounced normalization of anthropocentrism, I opt to render landscapes as they are idealized in my mind—Edens that perhaps were never meant to exist, much less be found—instead of documenting the destruction of actual landscapes. Unlike colonial renderings that used this very idealization to conceal that degradation, my material and compositional interventions leave visible seams that reveal what has been excluded from the narrative.
Two ongoing projects feature these seams: Re-Encountering the Tropics and Ecological Grief. In Re-Encountering the Tropics, I compose 35mm analog photographs into 3×3 collage grids, after José Manuel Fors, and use substitution to direct the viewer to what Miami’s tropical imaginary excluded from its postcard view. In Ecological Grief, I take photographs from lived experiences and pair them with versions manually altered by fire. Through videos documenting the process, the transition between the idealized and the actual crystallizes; with my hand in frame, videos also convey my complicity in the systems that produce degradation as the agent igniting the image. These three elements (the photograph, the burned print, and the video) surface the ephemerality of disappearance—compressing slow, hard-to-see change into a visible event.
Juxtaposition contextualizes the origins of my art practice. I first encountered an external juxtaposition. In bedtime stories, my father described the Miami of his youth. His memories of vibrant coral reefs and broad beaches galvanized the formation of my environmental imagination—in Lawrence Buell’s sense, the capacity to perceive, represent, and engage with the nonhuman. Growing up to witness the near decimation of this splendor, I began to recognize how different our Miamis were. Then, juxtaposition became interiorized. Deeply moved by Jorge Luis Borges’s “Borges y yo” in high school, I fashioned a double self to contend with seemingly misaligned artistic ambitions and intellectual pursuits. Finding no resolution, I created the moniker “WHOISRODB” to chronicle the liminality of becoming. As I embrace these external and interior landscapes, my visual art has become an instrument for reckoning with an inherited memory of Miami, one predicated on the despoliation of a place I would never know, and for reconciling my private, creative self with a public, academic self.
Critical methodologies are the source of inquiry; visible seams point to what was excluded in the idealized narrative; and felt truth is my north star. Inspired by Werner Herzog’s articulation of “ecstatic truth” as one reached “only through fabrication and imagination and stylization,” I too aim to purposefully use this visual medium to convey that wonder itself is at stake by prioritizing affect, equal parts grief and awe, over information. Today, I am working on a photo-memoir titled Landscapes of Revelation that uses achronological image sequences featuring devices such as side-by-side pairing, superimposition, collage, and material intervention to chronicle an ecological consciousness in formation. As I weave prose into this project to reground the viewer in a specific moment in time, my two selves—the private and the public—meet. A meeting, an integration, that I have always sought.
Rodrigo Bustamante is a Cuban-American visual artist and scholar. Originally from Miami, Florida, and born to a family of avid fishermen and freedivers, he found his first muse in the ocean, whose expansive horizon captivated his imagination. Through his intermedia practice, Rodrigo chronicles coming of age in the Anthropocene. He earned his BA in Global Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead-Cain Scholar. While at UNC, he directed a documentary about soccer’s power to build community in Havana, Cuba, conducted observational research in New Delhi and Jaipur, India, was recognized by the Carolina Global Photography Competition, and was Patagonia’s first-ever Editorial Intern. He is currently completing his MA in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was selected for the annual LLILAS Benson Student Photography Exhibition, Field Notes, and was awarded a Lozano Long Field Research Award. He is writing his thesis on the ways human-whale relationality manifests across multimodal expressive forms in the Caribbean.