Ruina Montium. Raphaëlle Peria

Raphaëlle Peria starts from photography, but moves beyond documentary image-making. She scratches, erases, draws, and physically intervenes on the photographic surface, turning the image into a terrain of marks, wounds, and revelations.

Ruina Montium takes its name from the Roman mining technique used in Las Médulas, in León: water was channelled through galleries inside the rock until the pressure made the mountain collapse, allowing gold to be extracted. The landscape still carries the visible memory of that radical transformation.

Centuries later, recent fires have exposed the mineral matter beneath the vegetation, revealing inherited forms almost like an accidental excavation. This is the territory where Raphaëlle Peria places her artistic research.

You’re watching:

• Landscapes shaped by water, fire, extraction, and time
• Photographs that are scratched, erased, and redrawn by hand
• Images where the land seems to continue transforming
• Photomontages with subtle gold nuggets, evoking the mining memory of Las Médulas
• A poetic tension between destruction and restitution

The result feels delicate but charged — like looking at a landscape that has been wounded, uncovered, and reimagined.