Voyage vers le centre du monde — Cristina de Middel, 2024

Cristina de Middel’s latest book is a surrealist travelogue and a fractured epic—part Jules Verne, part migrant diary, part hallucinatory road novel. Voyage vers le centre du monde documents the artist’s years-long engagement with the migrant trail through Mexico, often referred to by those who ride it as “La Bestia”. Rather than attempt journalistic neutrality, de Middel works in layers: documentary fragments, drawings, collages, and re-enacted fictions fold together into a luminous and troubling dream atlas. Monarch butterflies trace routes across maps; skulls and pyramids float alongside trucks, saints, and soldiers; a lone figure stands waist-deep in a lake beneath a dead tree. The book’s illustrated cover mimics a child's sketchbook but hides a far more charged story about the violence, fantasy, and resilience that shape contemporary migration. Published with Amnesty International, and including texts by Pedro Anza and citations from Verne’s Voyage au centre de la Terre, this is de Middel at her sharpest—turning myth into reportage, and reportage into myth.

Technical Sheet
Title: Voyage vers le centre du monde
Artist / Author: Cristina de Middel
Date: 2024
Technique / Printing Method: Offset, photogravure
Medium / Materials: Hardcover
Dimensions (cm): Approx. 17 × 24
Language: French
Publisher / Editor: Éditions Textuel
ISBN: 978-2-38629-011-4
Condition: NEW