In the series Bravo (2021–2024), Felipe Romero Beltrán transforms the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande at the border between USA and Mexico, into a silent and marginal protagonist, an intermediate space that embodies both physical borders and psychological ones.

The work is structured around three chapters: Endings, Bodies, and Breaches, and includes the video El Cruce (Crossroads)—a meditation on the river as both life source and militarized line. His photographs, which capture the architecture, objects, and bodies that orbit along the river’s 270 km, evoke a sense of suspended time, where waiting becomes a form of resistance. As Gloria Anzaldúa wrote in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), “The border is an inner experience, a psychic border, a spiritual border, as much as a physical one.”

Romero Beltrán’s work encapsulates this duality: in their austere sobriety, the portraits and interiors that make up Bravo reveal not only tangible wounds but also the invisible psychic scars carried by those who live along this embattled frontier.

Courtesy Sofía Lanusse