French Riviera and Italian Riviera
BY JOAQUIN MANUEL BOLUARTE JAVE
Modern ruins are not built with permanence in mind but instead arise from immediate social and economic purposes. Their abandonment stems from many causes: economic failure, eviction, violence, accidents; yet each ruin continues to mutate with time, resisting definition as a relic of a single past. Instead, they embody overlapping periods, always shifting toward the present.
As nature and time transform abandoned structures, they fragment into new landscapes born of human intervention and natural force. This unstable condition carries a certain beauty, yet risks being reduced to mere romantic or nostalgic imagery. Contemporary art therefore faces the challenge of engaging with ruins critically, questioning their monumentality, exposing their complex and often hidden histories, and resisting the banality of conventional ruin photography.
This project takes that approach in documenting the “French Riviera and Italian Riviera,” an unfinished condominium on Valdivia beach, 112km south of Lima. Abandoned after the 2007 Ica earthquake, the site reflects the tension between nature and human arrogance, where an attempted paradise of luxury has decayed into erosion, oblivion, and ruin. Now collapsed into the landscape, it reshapes the geography of Peru’s southern coast and embodies the fragility of human ambition against the persistence of nature.
ABOUT JOAQUIN
Joaquín Boluarte Jave, Peruvian documentary photographer with a sensibility to how society is reflected in the architectural hybridity that exists in his country. He sees the peculiarity of Latin American architecture as an inevitable outcome of underdevelopment, a condition that shapes not only the spaces themselves but also the way they are lived in and remembered. Joaquín studied General Literature at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru before pursuing photography at the Image Center, where he later worked in the Historical Archive. He went on to assist photojournalist Jaime Rázuri in Peru and Roberto Huarcaya in Madrid, contributing to exhibitions at ArcoMadrid, in Barcelona, and at Buenos Aires Photo. He is currently a journalist and photographer with the Inforegión Environmental Press Agency.