KOOZ Could you start by sharing a little bit about your childhood and the tensionsbetween your indigenous roots from the Andes community of Calacota and Bolivia’s urban reality in the 2000s?

RIVER CLAURE My grandparents come from an indigenous community in the Andes called Calacota; they migrated in the early 1970s due to political conflicts and in searchof better living conditions. They settled in Cochabamba, a valley at 2000m above sea level, where I am currently based. I grew up like any other child, influenced by the internet and global culture of the 2000. I was not very conscious — nor did I value my indigenous roots at all; in fact it is something I specifically denied. I remember episodes in my teens where I didn't want my friends in high school to know that my grandmother was Chola (a traditional indigenous woman).It was something of which I was ashamed, although of course now, I find that ridiculous. My aspirations as a 15-year-old city kid were to somehow culturally 'whiten' myself. These identity tensions didn't come to light until when I started making art in a serious and committed way; until I realised that everything I had denied in my teens was actually what I was searching for and talking about.

KOOZ The project presented at the Venice Biennale is part of an ongoing research project into former mining communities in the Bolivian Andes. What prompted the interest in these landscapes of exhaustion? How does the project document what is left today?

RC Before migrating to the city, my grandparents were miners working on foot in these old mining communities. There is a historiographic story taught in Bolivian high schools — of course it is fiction — but it is a story that appeals to the imagination and tries to describe or encompass a time that is difficult to understand through numbers. The story told is that with all the minerals (silver and tin) that the Spaniards took from the rich hill of Potosi in the colonial period, they could build a bridge from the Andes to Spain; conversely, it also says that with all the bones of the people who died mining inside the hill, they could build two bridges to Europe: one going and one coming back. This story uses imagination to talk about a painful period that marked the history of America. I think this is where my interest in these topics began, thinking about how important it is to resort to the imagination in order to generate knowledge.

KOOZ With this project, you return to these sites to think about the inherent relationship between nature and history. Can what happened in these places be an analogy of the world to come? What is the potential of this project of speculative fiction?

RC Let's talk about the end of the world. I think it is something that we feel to be very latent and close: forest fires, river overflows, massacres and so on. There are many dystopian fictions (movies, books, series and so on) that fantasise and even long for the imminent next step of late capitalism. These cultural products often reinforce Western centrality by imposing on us images in which we see the collapse of modern Western civilisations (usually the United States), trying to survive this misnamed and unique 'end of the world'.

I have been wondering what the 'end of the world' means for the ancient mining peoples of the Bolivian altiplano. There is an indigenous thinker who has brought a lot of light to my work — Davi Kopenawa — who says that contrary to the ideas of the end of the world as a future event, the end of the world has already arrived. It already happened in Latin America, when the European ships arrived and those men with arquebuses went down to 'discover' these lands. I believe that this idea changes the way that we imagine the end of the world as a single event.

The peoples of the Americas lived through the end of the world and not only that, they survived it. This is exactly what I am interested in 'thinking', or let's call it 'speculating'. For me these towns are an allegory of a world to come: the colony, the mining industry, our colonial and utilitarian relationship with the land have exhausted these mountains. Practically no more minerals can be extracted, all that remains are ruins and communities living around them; for better or worse, life continues in these places without romanticism, without fatalism. We survived the end of the world.

And to make these allegorical games that try to approach a global emotion about the end, I had to start from my particular history: the history of my family. Here my mother was born; here my grandmother grew up with her father to support her children; here my grandfather, a miner, played soccer games and then went out to get drunk into oblivion; here there were massacres; people fled from here; here people are still waiting for the end of the world, they do not know that the end came a long time ago.

KOOZ To what extent is the project a political statement addressing the vindication of the indigenous people against the hegemonic figures of power that resulted from colonisation?

RC There is a very long political tradition in Bolivia of movements that vindicated the indigenous peoples and their rights before the powers that be. Many times these positions have maintained a rather 'pure' or 'homogeneous' vision regarding the identity of these peoples. This is something that does not interest me particularly; I am interested in talking about the mixture and heterogeneous identities, that its virtue is in the ‘abigarrado’ and not in the differentiation.

KOOZ On the opposite wall, The Warawar Wawa project — Son of the Stars in the Aymara language — challenges the reductionist and folkloric representation of Bolivia proposed by Western narratives. What is the importance of reclaiming this identity? How does your work more broadly deal with the theme of identity?

RC Recognising ourselves in our own image seems to be inherent to the symbolic creation of our identity. Before knowing words at a very early age, children are able to recognise themselves visually; very soon we learn that our body can be projected onto other bodies and surfaces (mirrors, photographs or the very idea of wanting to look like someone else). When we identify ourselves as an image, our body learns to be an image. I think this happens on a personal but also on a collective scale; my work is an effort to directly question these dynamics. I believe that modern history and collective identities have been constructed by photography and until recently, these images were largely produced from either Central Europe or North America: images that delved into the exotic or even "inferior" individuality of the "Other" — Bolivia was no exception. I think that being represented for so long, in the same way, strongly affects the conception of identity of a whole region. In my images, I try to do two things: to question in an unconventional way the established ideas about collective identities and to observe the cultural and historical mix of which we are all the result.

KOOZ What is the value of exhibiting these works within the framework of the exhibition Foreigners Everywhere curated by Adriano Pedrosa at this year's Biennale Arte?

RC It is a huge privilege for me to be part of this historical moment.It is also an affirmation of all the work and research I have been doing; to place myself and be included in this exhibition is really something incredible for me.

Bios

River Claure is a Bolivian photographer and visual artist known for his meticulously constructed portraits and magical landscapes. In his work he questions both dominant notions of cultural identity and the importance of photographic images to our sense of reality. The son of an emigrant family from a small community in the Andean Altiplano, Claure grew up in the city experiencing the tensions between his own indigenous roots and the urban realities of the early 21st century. Trained first in his hometown of Cochabamba, he later studied contemporary photography in Madrid. His work has been exhibited in different platforms and platforms and institutions around the world. He is currently presenting his latest work at the 60th edition of the Venice International Art Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. She has collaborated with National Geographic, Libération, WeTransfer, Vogue Italia and currently holds a Magnum Foundation grant. Lives and works in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and storyteller whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2022 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.