Bocamina

In Bolivia, in a small mountain village, the daily rhythm seems marked by a time that no longer exists, by nature’s invisibles forces, by the will of the gods. In this place where there is no longer a difference between dreams and reality, during the festival of the dead, one can almost hear the voices of those who are no longer there, creating an invisible bridge between past and present.

Shooting in Santiago de Okola, the rural Bolivian village where his father was born, Miguel Hilari notes how the place intimidated him as a child. In The Corral and the Wind Hilari focuses mostly on children and animals as he records the stark beauty of the highland landscape while suggesting undercurrents of struggle and toil. Whether recording schoolchildren from the village as they perform songs and poems of resistance or an encounter between his uncle and a neighbour joking about a dog, the distance and formality with which Hilari treats his subjects implies both an admiration for these people and a longing for a deeper connection with the culture of his Indigenous ancestors.

In 1879, Bolivia lost its access to the sea in a war. When I was a child I did not understand how we had lost it; he thought the Chileans had taken him away in buckets. It is a diary towards interior landscapes, myths, characters and contradictions in a country that relives this loss every day.

Amid the lunar landscapes of the Bolivian mountains, the few traces of human presence seem minuscule, anecdotal. Shot by shot, Miguel Hilari’s camera follows these clues that lead to the city and its sonic confusion, where faces are captured with the same attention and poetry as the environment in which they live.