River Claure is a Bolivian photographer and visual artist best known for his meticulously constructed portraits, magical landscapes, and photographic docufiction series. The photographic series Warawar Wawa (2019–2020), an adaptation of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince set in contemporary Bolivia, and Mita (2022–present), a sensitive portrait of life in Andean mining communities that references five hundred years of colonial extractivism, both exhibit a fundamentally performative approach to photography. Rather than mechanical representations of a given reality, they appear as playful interventions in what we take as given. A portrayed person can become an actor, or a documentary photograph may become a film set. Claure’s photographs are real portraits of real faces, landscapes, and identities and are based on his extensive work living in and with real communities. They also joyfully reorganise the codes and arrangements that are made to depict a given reality: they are tableaux vivants in which the portrayed may speak the indescribable in their own way, based on the principles of self-determination and dignity and a little bit of magic.
This is the first time the work of River Claure is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz
