Felipe Romero Beltrán

Bravo situates itself in the liminal space of the Rio Bravo, a site of perpetual tension and migration where identity and geography intersect. Focusing on a 270-kilometre stretch of the river, Romero Beltrán’ Bravo constructs an elusive visual narrative where the river itself becomes a silent protagonist, shaping the lives of those who approach it but rarely appearing in the frame. Through stark portraits, austere interiors, and scarred landscapes, Bravo captures the suspended time of migration as his subjects wait, sometimes for years, in the shadow of an uncertain crossing.

Romero Beltrán’s signature style is precise in the pursuit of a political reality, where meticulously produced portraiture both reveals and conceals the resilience, exhaustion and hope of the migrant experience, alongside the muted delicacy of Romero Beltrán’s interiors, where a speaker, a mattress, a red-painted table become loaded with symbolic weight.

Divided into three chapters—Endings, Bodies, and Breaches—Romero Beltrán’s inscrutable documentary approach challenges the semiotics of classification, enclosure, definition, and identification in his visual aesthetics that mirror the suppressed and controlled notions of identity at the border.

The poetics of documentary, performance, and choreography combine to politically interrogate the dead time of bureaucracy for young migrants stuck in the Spanish legal system.

Dialect covers three years of state violence for nine young Moroccan migrants exiled in Kafkaesque limbo in Seville, southern Spain. When underage migrants enter the country illegally and cannot be verified as adults, their custody remains in the hands of the state – subjecting them to a lengthy process of up to three years to gain legal status.

In this state of suspension and liminality, Beltrán engages with the body as a metaphor: using a carefully articulated language between photography, performance and collaboration, the weight of dead time is registered upon the shoulders of these young men, entering into dialogue with their memories, journeys, and the humiliating mundanity of waiting and migration. Alongside video works and choreographed dance, Dialect breaks new documentary ground to shine a critical light on practices of bureaucratic oppression.