Agony in the Garden

Lùa Ribeira

2025 – Spain

About this series

Agony in the Garden is a series by Lúa Ribeira created in the peripheries of Madrid, Málaga, Granada and Almería. Inspired by the potential of contemporary counter-culture, she has collaborated with young people to make images that reflect on the alienation and uncertainty of the present era, resulting in a landscape suspended in time, one that appears both contemporary and ancient.
The sequence takes us through a barren, almost videogame-like landscape, where we encounter people who emerge as characters of an environment that is both local and global. The clothing, gestures and signs show affinities with and influence from online worlds and personas, echoing the extremes of hedonism and nihilism, all of which plays out in the backdrop of a rapidly homogenising world.
From this dystopian and sometimes absurd atmosphere, Agony in the Garden reflects on the current phenomenon of material overproduction, widespread precariousness, institutional violence, and ongoing financial, migratory and environmental crises.
This visceral feeling of uncertainty permeates throughout the work, whilst Ribeira’s inclusion of religious motifs and imagery nods towards more universal themes and a suspension of temporality. Underpinning all of this is a sense of tragedy and rootlessness, countered only by the energetic vibrancy of the youthful bodies that parade through the photographs. (In collaboration with Magnum Photos)

Photographer: Lùa Ribeira
Nationality: Spanish
Based in: Bristol, UK
Website:  www.magnumphotos.com/lua-ribeira
Instagram: @lua_ribeira

Lúa Ribeira was born in As Pontes, in northern Spain, in 1986. Stemming from her own heritage as a Galician, her work deals with dynamics of oppression and the mechanisms of exclusion implied by dominant culture. Her practice is characterized by its collaborative nature, extensive research and an immersive approach to her subject matter. She is interested in using the photographic medium as a means to create encounters that establish relationships and question structural separations between people and communities.
Ribeira has received several honors, including the Firecracker Grant for Women in Photography and the Jerwood/Photoworks Award, and has been nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award and Prix Pictet 2019. Her work has been featured in Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now (published by Thames & Hudson, 2017) as well as Raw View magazine’s “Women looking at Women” (2016). Her work has been exhibited internationally, in both solo and group shows, at Beijing Photo Biennial, Tabacalera (Madrid), Fundación Luis Seoane (A Coruña) and the International Center of Photography (New York).
In 2023, her first monograph was published by Dalpine, entitled Subida al cielo and featuring five series made between 2016 and 2020, in which she approaches topics with a historical relationship to documentary photography and representation, often within the context of institutionally constructed or held groups. “Los afortunados” (The Fortunate Ones) takes place in Melilla, alongside a group of young people in their journey to reach Europe from Morocco. In Galicia, Ribeira’s homeland, “Aristócratas” (Aristocrats) is made in collaboration with a religious institution that cares for a community of women with cognitive disabilities.
Ribeira joined Magnum Photos as a nominee in 2018, becoming an associate member in 2020 and a full member in 2023. She is based in Bristol, UK.