Journey to the Center (Spanish: Viaje al centro de la Tierra) by Cristina de Middel, made 2015–2021 across Mexico and the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, examines the Central American migration route from Tapachula to Felicity, California.
The project interrogates how migration is framed and instrumentalized in public discourse. Against this backdrop of polarizing politics, de Middel recasts travelers not as fugitives or threats but as protagonists of a perilous, voluntary quest. The work probes media shorthand, national myths, and Mexico’s ambivalent role as both passage and gatekeeper, asking how photographs shape collective understanding of movement, borders, and choice.
Visually, the series alternates between straight documentary scenes along tracks, deserts, and border towns, and staged tableaux that borrow the structure of Jules Verne’s adventure narrative. Technically speaking, the project blends digital capture with constructed interventions and found imagery, an approach the artist terms "expanded documentary." Fieldwork spanned both sides of the border, including Tapachula, Oaxaca, the Sonoran Desert, Arizona, and the peculiar destination of Felicity—the self‑proclaimed "Center of the World."
Exhibited at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2024 and shortlisted for the 2025 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, the project is widely regarded as an important statement within de Middel’s ongoing inquiry into fact, fiction, and authorship. Subsequent presentations, including an Irish premiere at the International Centre For The Image in Dublin, have reinforced its influence on artists exploring documentary elasticity, where symbolism, staging, and archival inserts complicate the evidentiary claims of the photograph.
