Mompox

Mompox — Territory, Transit and Memory

In December 2024, I travelled overland from Bogotá towards Colombia’s Caribbean region. Mompox was the destination, but the experience began long before arriving, in the gradual transformation of the landscape, in the towns crossed, along the roads and in the way territory changes while moving north.

This visual chronicle emerges from that observation.

It does not seek to describe a destination or construct an inventory of places. The photographs bring together fragments of territory understood as continuity: roads, settlements, architecture, bodies of water, vegetation and everyday scenes that acquire meaning through their relationship with one another.

Mompox occupies the centre of this journey. Its urban form is deeply determined by the Magdalena River. The city grew longitudinally alongside it and preserves an exceptionally intact historic structure.

But this work does not observe heritage alone.

Façades, churches and squares coexist with ordinary life, midday light, empty streets, conversations, shadows, movement and night. Beyond its historic condition, Mompox remains an inhabited territory.

The journey continues towards the water.

Leaving the street and entering the river system also changes the scale of the gaze. The river ceases to be background and becomes structure, a route organising landscape, human activity and much of the place’s memory.

The journey towards Ciénaga de Pijiño introduces another rhythm. Channels, vegetation, birds, reflections and horizons progressively displace architecture until only water and territory remain.

The five series that form this work, Road, Mompox, Hatillo de Loba, Landscape and Sincelejo, do not operate as independent galleries. They are stations within the same movement.

Each photograph preserves an instant.

The whole attempts to preserve something more difficult: the experience of crossing a territory.