Francisco Rodríguez, Una luna de hierro, 2017, 29min Screening and video introduction

Una luna de hierro – a ‘moon made of iron’ – opens with the poetry of Xu Lizhi, a worker at the Foxconn electronics factory in Shenzhen, China, who committed suicide in 2014 at the age of twenty-four. It then cuts across the globe to the waters of Patagonia. The sea as it appears in the film seems placid, but it is in fact a sea of desperation, horrendous working conditions and bodies overboard in liquid graves. Moving between the local and the global, the shore and the watery depths, Francisco Rodríguez inhabits the rippling wake of dead Chinese workers who attempted to flee their squid-fishing boat off the Chilean coast – far from the first for whom a long maritime voyage was one of no return.

Francisco Rodríguez is a Chilean artist and filmmaker based in France with a moving-image practice working predominantly with cinema, video and installation. Since 2015 he has been creating film and video works and exhibiting them internationally both in film festival circuits and contemporary art contexts. His work explores the flow of power within fluid global networks and territories, opacity of violence, the traces of the dead in the world of the living, oral traditions and their intersection with personal memory and popular myths. Recently his work has been presented at Taipei Biennial; Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York; VIDEONALE, Bonn; FID Marseille; Collection Lambert, Avignon, France; CPH:DOX, Copenhagen; Shangai Film Festival; Courtisane, Ghent, Belgium; Doc Lisboa; Viennale, Vienna; Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand among others.