In February 2018, something small but quietly decisive took place between two unassuming cities in Chile. One was Talca, a town in the south often jokingly described as the most boring place in the country. The other was Quilpué, a city that, for many of those involved, existed more as a vague name than as a known place. What was presented as a workshop, supported by the Centro de Extensión of the Universidad de Talca and led by filmmakers José Ibáñez and Ignacio Rojas Vallejo, became our first sustained encounter with the video letter as a shared practice.
The initial idea was simple: to connect two cities through video letters. Talca would write to Quilpué. Quilpué would reply. The exchange would continue back and forth, allowing a dialogue to take shape over time. Participants were asked to send a letter to someone they did not know, located in another city. They were asked to do so without relying on prior knowledge, clear narratives, or communicational efficiency. The absence of certainty was not a problem to be solved, but the condition from which the letters could emerge.
Among the works produced during that first workshop, one video letter stood out for its ease and precision of tone. Made by Luciano Contreras, the piece does not attempt to define Quilpué. Nor does it try to construct a symbolic dialogue between cities in any conventional sense. Faced with the simple fact of not knowing what Quilpué was, or how to address someone there, Luciano chose to ask others. Friends, acquaintances, strangers. He recorded their answers in Talca, collecting fragments of speculation, humor, and vague memories about a place that remained largely imagined.
What unfolds is a playful and deliberately imprecise form of inquiry. It follows reality as it happens and allows itself to be guided by chance encounters, everyday speech, and small digressions. There is no message to deliver and no argument to sustain. Instead, the letter builds rhythm, lightness, and a sense of openness. Through this looseness, something is nonetheless transmitted: a feeling, an instant, a mode of attention.
This is where the video letter reveals its strength. Rather than delivering information, it conveys a tone. Rather than asserting meaning, it proposes a gesture. Luciano Contreras’s letter works because it does not try to over determine its purpose. It remains fresh, improvised, and responsive to the moment. In doing so, it reaches its unknown recipient not through clarity, but through shared uncertainty.
Looking back more than seven years later, this first workshop now reads as an origin point. Since 2018, we have continued to develop and host multiple video letter workshops in different contexts, always returning to the same intuition: that the letter creates a space of intimacy that operates at a different scale from most contemporary image production.
In a visual culture shaped by speed, visibility, and constant circulation, images tend to function as immediate, almost reflexive responses. The video letter introduces another temporality. It allows hesitation. It tolerates not knowing. It speaks without assuming an audience. For this reason, even if the word is often misused, the video letter can be understood as a form of resistance. Not a loud or oppositional one, but a gentle divergence from dominant modes of production and consumption.
Resistance here means offering another kind of connection. One that is not performative, not disposable, and not optimized for attention. A form that privileges relation over exposure.