The silence of the volcano

2025

What the earth does not forget

At more than 5,000 metres above sea level, the Nevado del Ruiz rises in a thick silence. Beneath the mists and the old ash, it holds the memory of the 1985 eruption, so recent still, when the mountain melted all at once and sent a torrent of mud down onto the town of Armero. Twenty-three thousand lives were erased in a single night, and since then the landscape has closed its wounds on the surface. But memory remains underground.

This series, shot on film on the slopes of the volcano, explores that deep silence. The air is thin; every movement becomes an effort. Walking, framing, breathing: everything happens slowly, with an attention that is almost suspended. Altitude imposes another sense of time, that of short breath, shifting light and the invisible rhythms of living things.

The images capture a world of mist, dense vegetation and saturated colour. Red and orange veils drift across some frames, as if the heat of the eruption still lingered in the air. In places, light leaks into the film, leaving fine burns and uncertain halos on the image, as if the volcano were still imprinting its traces.

At the heart of the mountain, the frailejones raise their strange forms, half cactus, half statue. These rare plants, covered in silvery down, grow slowly and only in these high Andean moors, where few species survive. Their presence turns the landscape into a singular, almost fictional place: a territory suspended between threat and poetry.

Here, the Nevado del Ruiz is not a geological archive. It is a living body, whose pulse photography gently touches. It asks what the earth keeps, what it releases, what it is waiting for. In a world shaken by the climate emergency, this contemplation becomes a way of remembering, but also of caring: slowing down, looking, reconnecting. For if the volcano burns, it also breathes. And it is perhaps in this slow breathing that a possible future takes shape.