Inside Cristina De Middel’s Journey to the Center of the World

Walk into the Église des Frères Prêcheurs in the city of Arles, France, this summer, and you are immediately immersed in Cristina De Middel’s magical realist series and photobook, Journey to the Center. The series traces a part-fiction, part-documentary story of migration from southern Mexico to California. 

The project started in 2015 while De Middel was living in Mexico. “When I started the project, it was a really big topic,” she explains. “It was a time in which politicians on both sides of the border were being very vocal about the subject of migration, and with very polarized opinions. Migrants who had been crossing this border for decades and centuries were now being presented to the rest of the world in a very redacting way, all the time focusing on criminality, and as people who are basically ‘running away.’”

Despite numbers of illegal crossings reportedly dropping to a new low that year, political debate, especially within the Republican presidential campaign, was nonetheless focused on “extending walls and expanding other enforcement measures,” the New York Times reported in 2015.

The series, she explains, aims to flip the narrative around migration and present the sides that are often overlooked or ignored, inspired by the courage that it takes to embark on the arduous, and often very dangerous journey, in order to support families back at home. “When I see the Western world criticizing migrants or being harsh on them and seeing it as something dangerous, it’s very hard for me not to ask myself, would you be ready to leave everything you have… just sacrifice yourself so that your family can have a better life?”

“I think this level of sacrifice and of respect and responsibility for the family is not something that we are used to anymore in the Western world. So I really wanted to try and present them as heroes rather than cowards.”

The project started when De Middel was in Los Angeles and decided to rent a car for a few days. While driving along the border between Mexico, Arizona and California, she came across a sign that said the “Felicity Center of the World” and decided to explore. Inside, she discovered the story of a retired French legionnaire who had bought the land and declared that it was the center of the world, which was then confirmed by California’s Imperial County and  France’s Institut Geographique National.

“To me, the fact that the center of the world existed and that it was located in the USA, and determined by a Frenchman… there were too many clichés going on there, this arrogance of deciding where the center of the world is and in such a meaningful location, from where actually many migrants need to walk through.”

From there, drawing inspiration from Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the World, and using Felicity as her fictional “center of the world,” De Middel set out to explore various locations in the region that would allow her to tell her story, exploring volcanoes, caves, and landscapes around the border.

As with much of her practice, Journey to the Center blends fiction and reality in a half-documentary, half-conceptual approach. For seven years, De Middel spent time with people that she came across in what she calls an artistic collaboration, mixing this documentary-like approach and their real stories with a more surreal, mythological, or symbolic visual approach. 

In the video below, drawn from her online course Stranger than Reality, De Middel reveals the idea notebook that she used for the project, showing a rare glimpse into her ways of working and how she translates her ideas into visual and creative expressions.

“This exhibition is not here to provide answers,” she tells French journal Konbini. “But more to move away from this polarization of society which uses migration, in other words, real people and their lives, their fate, their dreams, as a political tool or a weapon to create further divides within society.” 

Visit the exhibition “Journey to the Center” at the Église des Frères Prêcheurs in Arles, France until August 25, 2024. 

“Stranger than Reality,” De Middel’s online course is now on sale as part of the Magnum Summer Sale. This August, use the code “SUMMER20” at checkout for 20% off.