Castaway / Soltar Amarras

Result of my artist residency in Perla Blanca, Brazil, invited by Copperbridge Foundation, Castaway is an encounter with bewilderment and fear in paradise.

I wanted a few days of silence. I was beginning to dismantle our family home, the one in which my children grew up, and had just opened Gran Mar, a photographic exhibition that required many months of laboratory and production. I felt a deep need to rest.

While we were viewing that exhibition together in July 2019, Geo Darder invited me to take refuge in Perla Blanca, Brazil. He wanted to test it as a creative center for the Copperbridge Foundation, as a residence for artists to create. He described the place to me as a point of still wild nature, which it is, and a very simple, very elementary cabin. As it is. He spoke to me of his vision. I listened to it from my own longing. Arriving at a house at street level was my first surprise. I imagined it on the seashore … Yemayá opened its light blue door to me.

A couple of mermaids and a gypsy girl share altar with Yemayá. I always liked them, not only because they were naked showing off their beautiful fishtails but because they are seductive... attracting the object of their desire to the depths of the sea. It is not uncommon for this to happen. Mamacocha first seduced me with shells and seaweed, shore flowers, and drawings in the sand until she pushed me to follow in the footsteps of the huireros, gatherers of algae from the Austral Pacific until I became La Huira. When she introduced herself to me as my alter ego, I didn't know she was a mermaid, until I ran into her head-on in an alley in Barranco in Lima. This is how Yemayá, Pincoya are, maybe Mamacocha and all the others, but they are also mothers and magicians. They surround their lovers with riches and embrace them, transforming them.

I entered Perla Blanca with the New Moon and Uranus, the lord of surprises, crossing the sky. Disquieting star signs for a journey without coordinates …

I didn't understand a single word around me. Nothing was what I expected, but that is not strange. The Venus, who inhabits me falls in love for no reason with a particle of the universe forgetting all the others. Not understanding voices and words or having coordinates to locate oneself can be very uncomfortable. However, such a scenario has the virtue of activating new senses in me and sharpening my perceptions. Perla Blanca put a lot of pressure on me at a time of great changes and vital movements, at a time when I was trying to stop and be silent to dream new desires to attract.

I believe deeply in pleasure as a creative engine, as Einstein claimed: "creativity is intelligence having fun" but its opposite is also a powerful catalyst. Today I know that this bewilderment that I experienced in Perla Blanca, was the premonition of a breakdown that in less than six months became a planetary reality ... Alone and tired, my monsters dragged me: shipwreck mixed with a cocktail of an ineffable nature that, for being beautiful and peaceful, was threatening and aggressive to me.

My first lifeline was my camera and putting limits on my surroundings, ensuring my silence. I wanted to discover the territory for myself, from my way of being, without impositions.

Perla Blanca, the house, bears the colors of Yemayá that came from Nigeria, just across the Atlantic. It is a sanctuary of syncretic deities, a beautiful altar of sacred images and objects charged with magic, living atmospheres. At night the palms and crickets sang, frogs and butterflies entered, who knows ... maybe other animals that I did not know. Behind the light blue bars and in the company of the wind, I slept alone and shrouded in a single white sheet to defeat the mosquitoes and drive away the spirits that disturbed my dreams.

I ate fruits and sometimes some fish that María prepared for me, a sweet mother who saw that I was scared and lovingly cradled me. Very early in the morning, a flower and cold water bath focused my intentions and when the sun went down, and all the candles in the house and the altars were lit, I would surrender to my own wake while meditating. Some of my expired Isabeles (self) died in me during those rituals; Yemayá, the sirens, and the gypsy girl accompanied me when I wanted to go crazy and ensured my passage.

The tropical fringe has a trance effect on me: Cuba, Yucatan, Brazil ... that beautiful discomfort of sun and humidity, of hot nights, moves me to a state of connection, far from the mind. Nothing more hallucinogenic than fasting and silence produces powerful visions and conjures the being that really inhabits our bodies ... without masks. The soul, as in a long exposure shot, presents itself. My photos testify to the fear and fascination, the pleasure and the danger of playing alone on a distant shore: “Like butterflies, they never tire of flapping their wings. The brush of its leaves is music related to crickets and cicadas ... Even that innocent joy can be ripped off with fury if we are not firmly rooted, flexible, but in unity with the earth. Many coconut trees lie on the shore or at the bottom of the sea. Monumental, like Moais dejected, stripped of their magic, snatched their power ”.

I made photos to hold myself on this side of life. Two years later I question them and they whisper to me how I somaticized the terror at the collapse of our civilization. Nothing foreshadowed what was dawning or I did not see it coming, but today I know with certainty that my residence in Perla Blanca was a premonition of letting go of all ties, all pain, all darkness, and trust; await for the new by dancing and singing until we connect with that being that we carry inside. Whatever happens ... In dreams I saw how the Earth was seduced layer by layer listening to my song to attract her to her own healing. Whatever happens, everything will be fine.

Today leaving the darkroom with the last photo that completes this work, I know that this series speaks of my panic at the vertigo of letting go of the known world that, today we know, has already left. We are sailing, there are still no known ports, sharpening our eyes and our skin to orient ourselves from the heart towards the stars. Everything is new and everything is former than us. Flowers for Yemayá!