A young girl walking down the aisle of a church or cathedral with ornate, dark wooden interior and intricate gold detailing. She is wearing a white coat and is brightly lit compared to the dim, richly decorated background.

Created over two years of travelling through southern Spain, Andalucía: Passion for Life looks beyond the familiar image of the region as a land of colour and celebration. Margarita Rousso turns instead toward the mythologies beneath it—the rituals, gestures and inherited ways of being through which identity is continually performed and renewed.

Margarita Rousso’s photographs move between public theatre and private life: flamenco dancers and crowded bars, solitary figures, children, monumental architecture and vast open landscapes. Within this vitality, exuberance sits alongside solitude, while fleeting gestures and chance encounters acquire an unexpected emotional weight.

Less interested in describing a place than in discovering the forces that animate it, Margarita Rousso approaches Andalucía as both a physical landscape and an emotional territory. Passion surfaces not only in performance and celebration, but in moments of stillness, intimacy and freedom. At its heart, the series is about the impulse to live fully.

Andalucía: Passion for Life was exhibited at Instituto Cervantes, Sofia, in 2019.

ANDALUCÍA: passion for life

A young boy running or playing on sandy desert terrain with mountains in the background and wind turbines on the right side of the mountains.

An elderly man with white hair sitting on a yellow bench, reading a book or paper, inside a rustic indoor space with brick arches and large green leafy plants in the background.