A Playful Investigation of Community and Territory

Since the sixteenth-century, mining has been a dominant part of the Bolivian landscape and economy. During the colonial era, silver mining played a vital role in establishing the dominance of the Spanish Empire, and to this day, the region has continued to see extraction for minerals such as tin, zinc, and lithium. In his series MITA (2022–ongoing), the photographer River Claure asks: What are the repercussions of five hundred years of colonial extraction on a person’s sense of identity, history, and territory?

Photographing throughout Llallagua, Uncia, and Catavia—all former mining communities in the Bolivian Andes—Claure explores the shifting dynamics between landscape and self. “With this project, I return to these sites to think about the inherent relationship between nature and history, and how what happened in these places can be and is an analogy of the world to come,” says Claure. “These images speculate about the end of the world, the memory of my family, and our colonial relationship with the land.” 

Born in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where he is currently based, Claure studied graphic design and visual communication at Universidad Mayor de San Simón, before pursuing a master’s degree in contemporary photography at the Centro Internacional de Fotografía y Cine, in Madrid. Today, he considers his artistic practice to possess three main threads: identity, immigration, and territory. His previous series include Jinetes (2018), a body of work on identity and typology of the Bolivian Amazon, and Warawa Wawa (2019–20), a recontextualization of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s 1943 novel The Little Prince within contemporary Andean culture.

When Claure began to delve into his family’s history in Bolivia, MITA came into focus. Both of Claure’s grandfathers worked in a silver mine in the region, having emigrated to Cochabamba in the early 1970s, fleeing political conflict and seeking better living conditions. “I began to have more intentional conversations with my grandmother about what our history had been like, how they had decided to migrate to the city, and what their memories of these places were,” Claure says. “There was something already brewing.” 

Claure immersed himself in the communities he was photographing for three months at a time. Seeking to work collaboratively, he shared his knowledge through photography and art workshops for high school children, many of whose families became subjects in MITA. “During my time there I became friends with the local radio station, and sometimes we ran announcements on the town radio, calling for people who wanted to participate in a teatro (theater),” Claure says, “the term teatro is friendlier than photography.”

Teatro is an accurate word for Claure, who describes his process of conceptualizing images as “writing directed games. I don’t have rigid or immovable ideas, they are games that trigger images or small stories that I would like to see visually.” There is a playful, fundamentally performative quality to the images. “‘Play’ for me is a space where the emotional, rational, and visceral meet.” 

Throughout MITA, Claure creates an amorphous blend of time, merging past, present, and future (or, as Claure puts it, “a post-apocalyptic future”). The resulting images feel like a mere second within a larger scene, a series of tableaux vivants inviting viewers to imagine what might transpire next. Two men, dressed in black and white, stand at odds against a bare landscape. A woman kneels with her face at the edge of a still pond disrupted by a mysterious splash, a foot ominously edging into the frame. A soccer player’s body leaps out of the image, with another player in motion on the ground, as if he’s propelled the player in the air.

Images of the environment and towns offer rare moments of stillness throughout MITA, reminding us of the unfulfilled promises of modernity. In one of the few photographs in which a subject stares directly into the camera, a woman’s face peers out, palms open, from a large triangular sculpture made from sheepskin and adorned with metallic birds and stars. Here, Claure seems to draw from the imagery of both the eighteenth-century painting Virgin of the Mountain of Potosí and Pachamama, or Mother Earth, a revered goddess of the Indigenous people of the Andes—attending to the multiple layers that create one’s understanding of their identity. 

In MITA, Claure doesn’t seek to provide a form of “truth” often associated with photography. Rather than straight representations of the people and locations he encounters, Claure’s images question our assumptions to address the multifaceted way identity can be marked by territory—and what it means when that territory is mired by centuries of colonial violence. “What happens when the landscape is exhausted? What happens when industry and modernity have consumed everything? What happens when flags and nation states define us less and less?” asks Claure. “Is it possible to identify myself more with a mountain, with a sea, with a jungle than with the nationality written in my passport?”

River Claure is a runner-up for the 2024 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.