Felipe Romero Beltrán, beyond the document

Barcelona,

In 2023, the young Colombian photographer Felipe Romero Beltrán was the winner of the Kbr Photo Award contest, convened by the Mapfre Foundation to offer opportunities and visibility to the novel creators in that discipline. Born in Bogotá and trained in Buenos Aires, Jerusalem and Madrid – last year, he was a doctorate in information sciences in the Complutense with a thesis on the documentary image – this author has been placing his projects halfway between that documentary genre (he deals with the record of the everyday, attends to defined historical and geographical realities) and the purely creative Works cover a wide field of study related to visuality as a whole.

Speaking of geographies, Romero Beltrán has focused on those who suffer or are subject to tensions and conflicts: one of his first works was Magdalenadedicated to the river of his country that, from the sixties until a decade ago, was the scene of fighting between the FARC and the army and tomb of many of its dead; Then they arrived Dialect/dialecton the legal limbo in which there are those who go through the Strait of Gibraltar, or the audiovisual pieces Recital (2020), Instruction/Instruction (2022) and This is your law/this is your lawthat earned him international recognition: last year this author presented in the Foam de Amsterdam.

Felipe Romero Beltrán. Gap #38. © Felipe Romero Beltrán

The proposal with which Romero took the Kbr Photo Award was Bravoand again it took us to a border ground, and therefore of dispute: the river that separates the United States and Mexico. He runs along 3,000 kilometers, but the photographer chose to locate his investigation in his bank near Monterrey, where thousands of people try to cross it in their migrations, a habit that has a fundamental weight in the ways of life and the identity of those who reside in the city. This constitutes the last stage of more than hard displays from Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador or Guatemala; And the surroundings of Monterrey, a militarized zone: what happens before wading the river interests the artist more than his channel itself, secondary actor. In Romero’s words, the Bravo River does not order its project, but limits it: It is an exhaustion exercise until you reach the river, without the possibility of crossing it. In that sense, the river exists as its visual denial, focusing interest on what precedes: the entrance to the United States.

There are fifty -two images that make up this essay, between architectures -in which textures, colors and traces of the passage of migrants -people and landscapes are underlined, structured in the sample that KBR Mapfre Foundation now provides closures, bodies and Gaps. They are completed with an audiovisual piece, The crossingwhose realization is prior to the photos and that broadens the presence of the river to more extensive issues than the border: a Protestant baptism, a fishing contest, interviews on linguistic issues, the testimony of a swimmer who has no intention of crossing the brave, and that of the seller of the wet clothes of the migrants, which does for his own survival. Apart from its political role, the river is also a river, half of life and recreation.

This exhibition coincides in KBR Mapfre Foundation with the greatest monographic of José Guerrero, who photographs nature, architectures, archeologies and at the passage of time and the human footprint on them from a lyrical approach.