In the province of León, the landscape of Las Médulas preserves the visible memory of a radical transformation. There, the Romans applied the technique known as "ruina montium": a sophisticated hydraulic system by which water, channeled through galleries excavated in the rock, caused the mountain to collapse in order to extract gold. The water pressure opened the earth from within and shaped the landscape, leaving a territory profoundly marked by human activity.

Centuries later, other processes have once again traversed this landscape. Recent fires have consumed the vegetation that covered the slopes, exposing the mineral matter and revealing, as in an unintentional excavation, the forms inherited from history.

It is in this territory shaped by water and revealed by fire that Raphaëlle Peria—a French artist currently in residence at the Casa de Velázquez—situates her artistic research. Although her images originate from photography, her approach departs from documentary recording. On the surface of the prints, the artist scrapes, erases, and draws, intervening in the photographic material to bring forth latent forms. The image then ceases to be a mere medium of representation and becomes a field of exploration where the landscape seems to continue transforming.

In this series, Peria also incorporates photomontages featuring gold nuggets. These subtle presences evoke the area's mining history and function as a symbolic gesture: where the mountain was opened to extract its wealth, the artist seems to return these glimmers to the image, shifting the meaning of extraction toward a form of poetic restitution.

Between the erosion of water, the mark of fire, and the artist's patient intervention on the photograph, the landscape emerges as a stratigraphy of time and matter. Each image is thus constructed as a surface where geological memory, human history, and artistic gesture overlap. In dialogue with the festival's theme, "Reimagining," the work invites us to reconsider the landscape not as a fixed form, but as a territory open to new interpretations and new imaginings.

Image: Raphaëlle Peria. Resilience. Gold leaf, paste and scraping on photograph © Raphaëlle Peria