Published by Dalpine in 2023, Lúa Ribeira’s *Subida al Cielo* brings together five bodies of work made between 2016 and 2020. The projects move across distinct social and geographic settings, including Galicia, Holy Week observances, a religious institution, and Melilla, where young people attempt to reach Europe from Morocco. Their common subject is not a single community but the pressure exerted by social boundaries, institutions, migration, and inherited forms of representation.

Ribeira refuses to arrange these series as separate chapters. Instead, the photographs are interwoven, allowing gestures, bodies, and visual echoes to pass from one setting to another. This structure makes the book less a survey of discrete assignments than an argument about how apparently distant experiences can be connected through the act of looking. The human figure remains central, while the sequence repeatedly tests the limits of documentary description.

The book’s distinctive tension lies in Ribeira’s deliberate use of theatricality. Drawing on documentary practice while acknowledging religious imagery, mythology, painting, and performance, she constructs photographs that do not simply claim to report reality. They ask how images acquire authority, how suffering is pictured, and what kinds of encounter photography can make possible across structural divisions. Sketches, painted reproductions, and vernacular photographs are also incorporated as part of this wider inquiry into visual precedents.

An essay by Carlos Skliar accompanies the photographs and extends their consideration of documentary representation and theatrical form. For collectors, the significance of *Subida al Cielo* lies in the coherence of its editorial conception: five projects are transformed into a single, deliberately unsettled sequence. The 2023 first edition, issued as a 212-page hardcover by Dalpine, presents Ribeira’s mature engagement with the ethical and formal complications of photographing lives shaped by exclusion and movement.