Alí­ Marí­n

Documentary Photographer and Visual Artist
  
Tierra Baja
Location: Mexico City
Nationality: Mexican
Biography: Born in the state of Veracruz in Mexico, and beginning as a photojournalist in 2012, Alí Marín is now a documentary photographer and visual artist transiting across the center and south of Mexico. In his documentary photography uses... MORE
Public Story
Tierra Baja
Copyright Alí Marín 2024
Date of Work Jan 2017 - Ongoing
Updated Aug 2020
Topics Archive, Documentary, Identity, Landscape, Latinamerica, Photography, Portraiture, Travel
En la Tierra Baja

At the river basin of the Papaloapan river in Veracruz, Mexico, the people have built a story, an economy and a very peculiar culture. Their lives are both determined and threatened by the river’s annual swelling. Nevertheless, their roots withstand the nature and resist forgetting.

En la Tierra Baja is a photographic narrative based on the concept of the family album in order to explore the relationship between the community of Tlacotalpan and the river, not only as a way of living but also as a form of Resistance. The yearly rise of the river poses a historical contradiction: on one hand, it is a means of transport, an economic source, a reason to belong and an originator of traditions; but on the other, it is an unstoppable force of nature that threatens to kill everything. However, there’s no river capable of erasing the intangible, the permanent.

This is a story about the conservation and preservation of a memory. A story about an the inherent necessity to belong to our environment. This is the story of a town whose existence is essential in the understanding of life in this region—a town that refuses to vanish and that prevails by telling itself: “the river gives but it also takes.”
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