Under Construction (or, The Place I was Born No Longer Exists)

It took some time to notice, perhaps, but with Aquí se construye Ignacio Agüero was beginning to transform, in splendid isolation, the argumentative or story-driven logic of the Latin American documentary. He replaced it with an associative, unemphatic language that played with moods and emotion in quite unexpected ways. The initial urge to simply document the changing face of a Santiago neighborhood revealed an extraordinary sensitivity to the metaphorical potential of images. What at first appearance might seem simply a melancholic portrait of a world on the cusp of extinction, becomes a searing political indictment of the consumer culture of which we are all a part. – Andrés Di Tella