Journey to the Center

 

Journey to the Center is a series that borrows the atmosphere and structure of the Jules Verne book Journey to the Center of the Earth to present the Central America migration route across Mexico as a heroic and daring journey rather than a runaway.

In this version of the journey, the starting point is Tapachula, the Southern border of Mexico with Guatemala, and the journey ends in Felicity, a small town in California that is the officially “Center of the World”. The absurdity of this landmark, from where you can see the border fence, just adds a layer of dystopic disappointment and becomes the perfect colophon for a contemporary version of a heroic jest, where the final destination is little less than a roadside touristic attraction.

With a language that combines straight documentary photography with constructed images and archival material, the narrative becomes multi-layered in order to complete the simplistic approach that media and official reports provide of the complex phenomenon that migration is.

Cristina De Middel

 

Born 1975 in Alicante, Spain.

Lives and works in Brazil.

 

After ten years as a photojournalist, Cristina De Middel shifted her practice to a more conceptual approach in order to question the documentary value of photography. In 2012, she produced the acclaimed series The Afronauts, triggering a decade of work around the role of photography in creating stereotypes. Besides her prolific career as an author, and as an active member of the photography community, Cristina has been invited to curate festivals like Lagos Photo, PhotoEspaña, and San José Photo in Uruguay. She has published more than fourteen photobooks and her work is constantly on show in different institutions and venues. Cristina is on the board of Vist Projects, a platform to support Latin American visual story-telling, and she is a member of Magnum Photos agency and its president since 2022.