Coirón

In the far south of Chilean Patagonia, ageing gauchos live alone on vast ranches, sustaining a way of life built on endurance and repetition. Their lives are shaped by distance, physical labour, and long periods of solitude, on land they do not own. When drought takes hold and their bodies begin to fail, they must decide whether survival means adapting, leaving or being left behind.

Coirón is a long-form documentary project, photographed over six years in the Chilean region of Magallanes, functioning as a collective reflection on rural life in contemporary Chile, where meaning emerges through repetition, gesture, and the slow accumulation of time.

The wider region is undergoing rapid social, cultural, and economic change, and fewer young people feel the desire to pursue a life on the land, breaking a generational cycle of farm life. Caught in the middle, many puesteros move between embracing change and resisting it. Their interweaving stories form an intimate, complex portrait of a way of life on the brink of disappearing, and invites the viewer to pause within a world moving too quickly to keep up.