Dialect

2022 - Photography (Photography)

104 x 130 cm

Felipe Romero Beltrán

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Dialect by Felipe Romero Beltrán is a photographic series that follows a group of immigrants who have recently crossed the strait (the maritime border between Morocco and Spain) to avoid border controls. The young immigrants settle in Seville while their legal situation is either resolved or refused. Reflecting on his own status as a migrant, Beltra?n’s series of photographs documenting Morrocan immigrants is a tribute to their trajectories; a trace of their existences. Beltra?n first met the subjects of Dialect during a theater workshop. He speaks with the group about his own experience of being a migrant in Spain. After learning that he was a photographer, some of the men (who were teenagers at the time) asked the artist to take a few pictures that they could use for social media. Beltra?n’s collaboration with this group of migrants later evolved into an artwork as they entered adulthood. One photograph in the series depicts the body of Bilal draped over the shoulders of two friends, reenacting a moment when Bilal fainted during his journey from Tangier to Seville. In reproducing the droop of a young man’s hips, the fall of his arm, the sight of his worried brow smoothing out, Dialect creates a chance for its subjects to relive some of the more difficult moments in their young lives, and, in doing so, transform those moments into gestures of beauty and tension, poetically undone by novel forms of collective support.

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Felipe Romero Beltrán is a photographer whose practice is characterized by his interest in social matters. The artist’s process is typically structured around long-term documentary projects that require extensive research on their subjects. For example, Beltrán’s work Magdalena (2017) considers the Colombian civil war that ended in 2016. The bodies of many of the victims killed during the war were thrown in the Magdalena River, which is a vital water source fundamental to the nation. For years, those fishing in the river have found body parts caught in their nets. With this in mind, the local populations have practiced religious rituals to gain the favor of the dead. The story that Beltrán portrays through his work merges these magical practices with the practical realities of reconciliation and healing. The remarkable sensitivity with which Romero Beltran captures his subjects may have something to do with his own precarious path as an immigrant from South America to Europe, via a major detour to the Middle East. He arrived at the Bezable Art School in 2014 in Jerusalem and spent a year and half there taking quizzical pictures of blocked streets and barricaded houses, another form of violence to which he had been exposed during the civil war in his home country of Colombia.

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Colors:

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• migration.n.01
• journey.n.01
• narrative.n.01
• community.n.01
• boundary_line.n.01