A football pitch balanced along the road, the contrast between a group of fishermen and the smoke of large factories in the background, a political rally in which the traditional clothing stands out above all. These are fragments of life, moments that make up the project by Pietro Paolini titled Buscando a Bolívar, a Tuscan photographer and one of the founders of the collective Terra Project.

Between 2004 and 2014, Paolini travelled across Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela, closely following the rise of the governments of Evo Morales, Rafael Correa and Hugo Chávez: three presidencies that redrew the political and social balance not only of their own countries, but of the continent, at a time when nothing was yet certain. Out of a decade of work in the field came Buscando a Bolívar, a photographic project later published in 2019 as a book by Editorial RM together with Landskrona Foto, Breadfield Press and Witty Kiwi.

Pietro Paolini does not narrate political events as they happen. He follows them as they settle into people’s lives, where hope, conflict and contradiction coexist without ever fully resolving into a single direction. His photographs keep their distance from the two opposing narratives through which the West often looks at the continent – saving socialism on one side, populist failure on the other – and instead give back the ambiguity of what is really happening. Changes that don’t follow a straight line, tensions that never dissolve into a moral.

More than a political discourse, Buscando a Bolívar is an exercise in looking, an invitation to distrust ready-made narratives and to search, within contradiction and uncertainty, for the tools to truly understand a piece of the world.