Enrique Pezo Gomez

Image from “Dig the river” project by Enrique Pezo Gomez

Biography

Instagram: @enriquepezo

Enrique Pezo Gómez (Iquitos, Peru, 1994) is a visual artist and researcher who develops his practice between Madrid, Marseille and Iquitos. Through the resignification of visual codes, he critically revises official narratives about Latin America and the Amazon, articulating new possibilities of representation from photography, speculative theory and the performativity of the image. He is a graduate of the Centro de la Imagen (Lima) and has completed postgraduate studies in Contemporary Photography (EFTI, Madrid) and Film Criticism (ECAM, Madrid). His work has been exhibited in Peru, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Spain, Italy, France and the United Kingdom.

The project

To “dig the river” is to open a wound. It means intervening in its flow, disrupting its course to expose the memory submerged within its waters. In the Amazon, this act is not a poetic metaphor - it is a tangible, systematic gesture. Dredgers violently pierce the riverbed, extracting gold, rubber, or oil. What they leave behind is not just muddied water or churned-up silt, but also silence, the displacement of entire communities, and the unraveling of an ancestral equilibrium between human, non-human, and spiritual bodies.

Digging thus becomes a form of cumulative violence. It strips away not only the physical land but also the symbolic layers that define the river as a living being. In the face of the dominant narrative of ‘progress,’ which reduces it to a mere resource, an urgency arises: to unearth the stories buried under the sediment of extractivism. Stories of resistance, of unseen presence, of spirituality suffocated by machines. Listening to the river means attending to its fissures, reading its bed as one reads a scar.

Image from “Dig the river” project by Enrique Pezo Gomez

Image from “Dig the river” project by Enrique Pezo Gomez

From this perspective, the body of water appears as a wounded archive. It no longer flows freely, it has been forced, punctured, and instrumentalized. Its surface reflects a distorted image, a development mask imposed by those who exploit it. Yet within its turbulence lies the force of memory as a form of resistance. To dig, paradoxically, is to listen: an attempt to restore voice to the silenced, to reimagine our relationship with the land and its memory through acts of care.