Villa Contó

(The gallery of this project is in progress).

Villa Conto is a small settlement in the Chocó region of Colombia. In this territory marked by conflict and systemic exploitation, women hold a central role as sustainers of life and collective memory.
Gold mining in the region has, for decades, walked a fine line between ancestral tradition and illegality. Armed groups and cartels control the territory, dominating gold extraction at every scale.                                                                                                                                             Yet each day before dawn, groups of women, accompanied by one or two men, navigate the river and cross jungle paths to reach their worksite—an itinerant mining area they call La Lejura, meaning "somewhere far away."
Using hoses powered by a rudimentary generator, handcrafted structures, and nothing but their hands with simple tools, women carve through the jungle and sift its waters in search of gold.
Many become mothers in adolescence and grandmothers before forty. While most continue to uphold the ancestral tradition, others leave looking for new opportunities—often facing new forms of uncertainty in larger cities.

This photographic series documents the community of Villa Conto—youth, women, mothers, miners, and guardians of tradition—those who remain in this remote settlement deep within Chocó’s dense landscape, searching for gold, and those who have left for larger cities chasing  a different fortune. Their often unseen reality carries a long history of strength and resistance within a forgotten region shaped by conflict and exploitation. The work fluctuates between the raw, earthy textures of a life rooted in community and the fragmented, often dissonant realities of urban displacement
This series portrays and witnesses perhaps the beauty behind the toughness of a community that remains standing through time.