Instructions and Possibilities to Scare a Mountain
River Claure and Mafe Moscoso initiated a conversation whose starting point was a mountain and a volcano. The mountain is the subject of River Claure's film Instructions and Possibilities to Scare a Mountain, a ritual and speculative audiovisual project created in collaboration with the inhabitants and former miners of Cerro Rico de Potosí in the Bolivian Andes. During the colonial era, it was thought to be the richest source of silver in human history. Since then, the land has been depleted, and only the towns built around the industry and the promises of modernity remain.
The volcano is Cotopaxi in Ecuador, which lends its name to a recently published science fiction fable by Mafe Moscoso in which the characters are interplanetary migratory animals that embark on a circular journey beginning inside the crater and extending through geological layers until they reach the Mediterranean. The fable employs the cyclical sense of time typical of Andean ontologies, in which beginning and end are intrinsically connected.
The session will take the form of a b2b (back-to-back) dialogue linking photography, film and writing to tell tales of regenerative rituals and imaginaries.
River Claure
Is a Bolivian photographer renowned for his magical landscape portraits and docufiction photographic series. One example is his series Warawar Wawa (Son of the Stars) (2019-2020), which presents an alternative Bolivian identity that, without denying its Western traces, is aware of its roots and recontextualises Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince in contemporary Andean culture, in which the boy protagonist wears an FC Barcelona shirt. In his series MITA, he also observes a depleted territory and the communities that remain there in order to produce intentionally anachronistic images that speak of the colonial relationship with the land and evoke a sense of anxiety about the end of the world.
Mafe Moscoso
Was born on the edge of volcanoes in Ecuador, and her work combines writing, ethnography and art in an artisanal, experimental manner. Her publications include the short story collection La Santita, which opens up cosmopoetic worlds where the boundaries between body and spirit, culture and nature, feminine and masculine, playfulness and rationality, science and magic dissolve. Drawing inspiration from the cosmologies of the Andean world and its profound violence, Moscoso works magic with words, inventing rhythms and blending references from popular culture alongside those of an ancestral pop culture. She is also the author of the essays Hostal España: el gesto hospedante, la etnografía hospedante (2023) and Biografía para uso de los pájaros: infancia, memoria y migración (2013), as well as the poetry collections Desintegrar el hechizo: versitos anti-coloniales and Crónica Roja (2021).
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Place
Fundació Joan Miró
Dates
Saturday 11 April 2026, at 11 am
Price
4€, reduced 3€ (library card or Friends of the Fundació)
Reservations
Online tickets (coming soon)
