River Claure: Bolivian artist blends colonial history, indigenous roots, and play

River Claure (Cochabamba, 1997) is a Bolivian artist whose work spans photography, video, and installation, creating a visual archaeology that layers time, history, territory, identity, reality, and fantasy. His series 'Mita' (2022-2024) and 'Warawar Wawa' (2019) were presented at the 2024 Venice Biennale, 'Stranieri Ovunque'. 'Mita' references his grandparents' lives as silver miners in the Bolivian Andes, exploring extractivism, memory, and the end of the world. 'Warawar Wawa' (Child of the Stars in Aymara) reinterprets 'The Little Prince' to discuss identity construction while subverting the colonizer's folklorizing gaze. His video 'Instrucciones y posibilidades para asustar a una montaña' (2024), made with residents and former miners of Cerro Rico de Potosí, proposes a ritual where soccer players 'scare' the mountain and its colonial ghosts. Claure has won the Italian EXPOSED prize (2025) and a Magnum Fellowship in the US (2023). He describes his practice as intuitive, influenced by his evangelical pastor parents, theater, and the concept of 'chi'xi'—an indeterminate gray in Aymara weaving that resists fixed categories. He aims to 'announce' rather than denounce, collaborating with communities through play. Current projects include a series of self-portraits exploring his relationship with evangelical iconography and the contemporary art market, and a trilogy of video artworks imagining the beginning and end of the world, to be presented at the Climate Biennial in Vienna.