The five photographs in the series La Rinconada (2012-2016) are part of a project devised by Magdalena Correa as a photographic portrait of the Peruvian town of the same name, located 5600 metres above sea level and considered to be the highest human settlement in the world. Roughly 20% of the town’s 40,000 inhabitants, attracted to La Rinconada since the 1980s by job opportunities at a gold mine in a glacier, are former convicts from countries neighbouring Peru. The potential wealth provided by the ore contrasts with the precarious working conditions of the people who extract it. La Rinconada is a place where the labour system and the model of land use have generated particular forms of architecture, coexistence, conflict and changes to the landscape. Overall, the La Rinconada series is a broken narrative sequence where the land, the debris and the wildlife living alongside human waste, the temporary leisure areas and the distinct domestic architecture shed light on the real material conditions on which certain economic systems are built, with gold as the great talisman underpinning financial capitalism (albeit more symbolically than actually), converted into profit or luxury far from La Rinconada. In this way, Correa forges a link to the memory of the country and all of the Southern Cone, unleashing the phantom of the tension between colony and metropole, and resurrecting, through images, the fantasies of El Dorado entertained by the looters of those territories during the colonial period. As Correa explains, “I am interested in exploring territories that are in a situation of isolation, precariousness and oblivion, places where life is “perilous” and the inhabitants have to withstand the tough conditions imposed by the great power of nature. I am driven to look around and observe those unknown, isolated spaces of human geography that commonly exist alongside our everyday life without concerning us, perhaps because they are absent from the media, because we are surrounded by comfort and convenience and have no need to interest themselves in them and because, in many cases, they are so difficult to reach that they quite simply do not feature on the maps”.

Carlos Martín