BEATRIZ CONSUELO DE MURIEL

— Echoes of Africa

Beatriz Consuelo is a Colombian photographer.. In the photographs of the African desert becomes more than landscape; it becomes memory, myth, and meditation. Her work transforms the stark silence of Namibia’s Deadvlei into a living canvas where time itself appears arrested. The skeletal acacia trees, long dead yet defiantly upright, stand as witnesses to a vanished river, a vanished era, and the unbroken pulse of survival etched into the sand.

Muriel’s editing heightens the surreal quality of these places. The burnt umber of the dunes glows like fire against the ghostly white clay, and the trees, stripped of leaves and centuries of life, rise like shadows frozen in ritual. The result is a theatre of contrasts: light and darkness, presence and absence, endurance and fragility. In her lens, the desert is not empty but saturated with voices, histories, and a poetry that resists erasure.

Her photographs carry an almost painterly weight. The vibrant reds and oranges evoke the heat of the earth’s core, while the delicate skeletal branches suggest brushstrokes across an infinite sky. This interplay between the elemental and the artistic is central to Muriel’s vision: she does not merely document Africa’s landscapes but reimagines them as portals of contemplation, where nature becomes abstraction and silence becomes narrative.

For viewers, these images invite both awe and reflection. They remind us that life and death, presence and absence, are not opposites but companions. In the stillness of these trees, one feels a strange vitality: an ancient dialogue between endurance and impermanence.

With her African series, Consuelo Muriel proves that photography can be both witness and dream, a bridge between the real and the imagined, reminding us that even in desolation, beauty endures with a voice as eternal as the desert wind.

CONTACT: +57 3128661033

EMAIL: bcdemuriel@yahoo.com