PHOTO GALLERY
SRUTI / REVELACIÓN
Dorje Wangel was only 7 years old when he had to escape from Tibet with his parents. Originally from Ngari, the area of the famous Mount Kailash, his father was warned of the advance of the Chinese army, which had no qualms about looting, destroying monasteries, arresting and killing whoever it wanted. They took with them what they could and without looking back, after several days on foot through high mountain passes, they crossed the border and settled in the Chantang valley in Ladakh, India.
Over time they built a small village and some chose to remain nomads, with their animals and tents.
Except for some isolated news, he never heard anything more from his relatives who remained on the other side of the mountains.
We met in 2015 in the middle of nowhere at 4000m above sea level, he with his horses and I with my motorbike, I stopped him to ask him if he knew a girl I had photographed in 2009 and that I was looking for to give her that portrait.
We became friends and I started visiting him year after year, working on a documentary about him, his family, his life.
On one of my last visits, I photographed him without realizing that the analog camera was malfunctioning. I had great expectations for the result, especially for a portrait of him with his village behind him. On my return, when I got the films developed, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. For some reason, the camera stopped collecting the film correctly and the shots began to overlap and multiple exposures to take place at random. These failures caused me great frustration.
But over time, I began to look at these « failed images » with different eyes. I had the intimate feeling that perhaps I had not been so wrong; the narrative potential of the images was revealed as something stronger than the images themselves.
This is how I returned to the silence of the immensity of spaces that give rise to doubt about one’s own existence and to understand that, behind chance, the synchronicity of events and what escapes control, there lives the soul of the world that fascinates me.
Title: Sruti/Revelación
2020 © Federico Frangi
Exhibition from April 20 to June 8, 2023
at Fundación Casa del Tibet Barcelona.