In the works presented in Llave de Paso, Camilo Ortega draws on the landscape of the Atacama Desert to examine the different ways water shapes and transforms the territory. Pipes, mining infrastructure, and arid expanses coexist with gardens, swimming pools, and other images associated with well-being, tourism, and everyday life.

These seemingly distant elements are connected by a shared condition: they all depend on water's availability and circulation. In a territory defined by scarcity, Ortega draws attention to the infrastructures that channel, distribute, and control water, making visible a network that usually remains outside our field of vision.

Through these images, the artist brings together different ways of inhabiting and using the same territory, raising questions about the value water acquires, who has access to it, and the economic, social, and environmental transformations its distribution produces.

The water valve, a familiar object used to open, close, or regulate flow, thus becomes an image that runs conceptually throughout the series: a metaphor for access to and control over a natural resource essential to life.