“And they grieved for the life they had spent in reaching the paradise of shared solitude” – Gabriel García Màrquez

LAS CIÉNAGAS • Don Polo • Marco Vernaschi

Marco Vernaschi’s LAS CIÉNAGAS extends his exploration of how landscapes shaped by both mythology and meteorology define the Caribbean imagination. Building on the narrative opened with MACONDO—a visual meditation on the scorched aftermath of El Niño—this new chapter shifts focus to its climatic opposite: the long, water-laden breath of La Niña and the communities who endure its arrival.

LAS CIÉNAGAS • Los Primos • Marco Vernaschi

Where El Niño dries the land into cracked geometry, La Niña dissolves its contours. Rivers overrun their beds, temperatures plunge unexpectedly, and entire ecosystems are reordered with overwhelming speed. Along the Magdalena River, these abrupt reversals form a perpetual cycle through which daily life must be negotiated. People learn to inhabit not one climate but two, each carrying its own hardships and demands.

LAS CIÉNAGAS • Doña Amelia • Marco Vernaschi

For the fishing families who live in and around the great swamp system—las ciénagas—survival requires an almost ritualized adaptability. One season calls for rationing water and food; the next compels the reinforcement of homes or temporary retreats to higher ground. This continual pendulum between scarcity and excess has produced a culture of resilience so profound it borders on the mythical. Here, catastrophe is not an exception but a recurring guest, and the extraordinary blends seamlessly into the fabric of the everyday.

LAS CIÉNAGAS • Commuters • Marco Vernaschi

Photographed across the interconnected wetlands near Mompox—El Pijiño, Sincanacha, Juan Criollo, El Pajeral, Carrillo, and others—the series reveals a territory where the boundaries between natural order and magical thought appear porous. In these images, adaptation becomes not merely a strategy but an ethos: a way of being that embraces uncertainty with creativity, endurance, and a quiet, unassuming strength.

LAS CIÉNAGAS • Salomé • Marco Vernaschi

Rather than focusing on the elements of crisis, Las Ciénagas illuminates a worldview forged at the confluence of water, memory, and myth. It is a portrait of people who have learned to read the river’s mood as one might read the sky, and who continue to rebuild, reimagine, and reinvent their lives in dialogue with the forces that both threaten and sustain them.

LAS CIÉNAGAS • Las Farotas • Marco Vernaschi