El río / The River

(Edición bilingüe)

The book collects unpublished photographs that the American artist Zoe Leonard took along the Rio Grande (or Río Bravo) in 2017. It also includes commissioned texts by the Mexican poet and activist Dolores Dorantes, who has been living in exile in the United States for years. It is an immersion in the physical context, the actual barrier, the very heart of the border between Mexico and the US: the waters of the Río Bravo or Rio Grande. A number of figures appearing in the water recall something else, though: skin, scars, wrinkles, genitals, the writing of an unknown language. It is a visual-textual attempt at conversation that explores the tensions between the simple, ever-changing, but continuously fluid flow of water, and all the terrible complexities around, above and beneath it.