Claudia Peña Claros
Claudia Peña Claros (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, 1970) is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist. She is the author of four short story collections, two poetry collections, and a novel. Her latest book in Spanish is Antes, en cualquier parte (Parc Editores, 2023). In 2016, she won Bolivia's Franz Tamayo National Short Fiction Contest. One of her stories, “Verde,” was made into a film by director Rodrigo Bellott.
Initially, it might seem like Claudia Peña Claros is offering more of a word landscape than a story. “Room” dismantles traditional story structure—there’s no discernable beginning, middle, and end, yet there’s a striking sense that something real is happening. The closest analogue I can find is diachronic photography, when time itself becomes the protagonist and plot; a diachronic photographer documents changes in person (think of Noah Kalin’s “Everyday,” comprising twenty years of self portraits all stitched together in one youtube video) or place (David Maisel’s landscape photography and Library of Dust come to mind). Space is foregrounded in “Room” and characters are only briefly glimpsed at the edge of the frame. The result is a brilliant time-lapse, with conventions flitting at the periphery.