In the photographs of Eduardo Ortiz, La Paz is not just a city: it’s an enchantment suspended between sky and earth. Chukiyawu — the title of the project, taken from the name the Aymara ancestors used for this Andean valley, meaning “golden farm” — is a series that blends documentation and vision, reality and dream, into a visual narrative that defies any sense of linear time.

Ortiz portrays La Paz as a place where different worlds constantly brush against one another. Streets marked by colonial history intertwine with ancestral rituals that still appear in markets, parades, and everyday gestures.

The mountains surrounding the city are more than just a backdrop: they are silent, almost divine presences, guardians of a knowledge that predates time. In this context, a market stall can become an altar, a carnival can open new dimensions, and each photograph becomes a true threshold to cross.

In short, Chukiyawu doesn’t view La Paz as something frozen in the past but as a living, complex organism that breathes along with its people and its stories. It’s a narrative shaped by magical realism, in which the city itself becomes a bridge between the tangible and the otherworldly, between the present and what never truly ceases to exist.

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