The Seven Circuits of a Pearl

The Seven Circuits of a Pearl is a photographic exploration of the ocean as an archive of symbolic and material spaces witnessing and re-imagining untold personal and collective histories of loss.

The Seven Circuits of a Pearl is a photographic exploration of the ocean as an archive of symbolic and material spaces witnessing and re-imagining untold personal and collective histories of loss. The story begins with my relocation to Australia and the exploration of the faraway Western coast, where the Indian Ocean meets the Great Sandy Desert, and where for thousands of years, pearls have been treasured, sought, bought and stolen.

Like another living vessel of refracted time and memory, the archive of the journeys for pearls sails me back to the journeys of my late father as seen through his own personal archives during his time as a sailor in the faraway lands he explored. Driven by curiosity and captivated by the trove of an image of a woman with a pearl necklace found in them, I begin the journey towards the painful discovery of my father’s ex-wife and mother of a half-brother I have never met.

Maritime disasters, archeological, personal and missing evidence, become the thread between visual and textual material from museum collections, journals, diaries and memoirs researched, and further re-imagined aiming at creating an interrelational space amongst the fragments of a larger narrative progressing from an investigative to a more metaphorical and esoteric resolution.

In a parallel way, I reflect on the multifaceted and multimodal exchange, trade and commodification of pearls in relation to broader histories of empire, labour management and marine ecology, questioning not only whether humans exist in relation to history, but instead how to access and write the history of this relationship in contemporary art as an emergent response to a personal and cultural heritage in crisis.