DOUENS

Douens is a story about forest spirits. It is about how stories move through an archipelago; carried orally between islands, altered by place, and used by communities to manage danger, childhood, morality, and the unknown.

Douens is part of an ongoing world-building project set within The Wet Kingdom, a fictional Caribbean cosmology shaped by oral folklore, family memory, colonial cultural consequences, and the unstable geography of islands.

In this world, douens are both inherited figures from folklore that arise from the conditions of the archipelago itself: from wet forest, village roads, broken lineages, childhood fear, and the stories used to keep children close to home. They belong to a world where the land is shrouded in humidity and where the myth moves between islands, taking on both distinct and shared nuances of cosmology and warnings

Shot in Tobago, the work revolves around Les Coteaux, a village where douen stories continue to circulate through oral memory. From there, the project opens into a larger fictional system. The Wet Kingdom becomes a world where folklore is embodied across the Caribbean, where the supernatural can preserve forms of knowledge that formal histories often struggle to describe..

Rather than illustrating the douen directly, the photographs gather the world that gives rise to it: children, forest edges, flora and fauna, weather, domestic spaces, and culturally charged sites. The project treats the archipelago as both a geography and as a structure of imagination.