Tamara Merino
Land Beneath
It is a journey into the heart of a village, where people living with the desire to be invisible. Kupa Piti is located in the bleak Australian desert and breaks with all structures of conventionality. Its inhabitants, mostly immigrants, former convicts and war veterans, have lived underground since 100 years ago due to the extreme weather conditions that oscillate between 50 and -2 degrees Celsius. Kupa Piti is mined for Opal extraction, one of the most valuable semiprecious stones in the world, and it’s here that ambition, fever and obsession are born.
Tamara Merino (Chile, 1990). She studied analogue photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York and specialized in digital photography at the University of the Pacific in Santiago, Chile. She is an independent documentary photographer, focusing on social and cultural issues principally in Brazil and Chile. She currently lives in Australia.