Ojalá nos encontremos en el mar

Dates

2018 - Ongoing
Author

Gabriella N. Báez
Location Puerto Rico
Recognition

Main Prize Honourable Mentions - PhMuseum 2020 Women Photographers Grant

In the year following Hurricane María, approximately 279 suicides were recorded in Puerto Rico. On July 11, 2018, just two months before the first anniversary of the hurricane, my father died by suicide. Later that year, after receiving the objects he left behind, I photographed each of them and began looking for vestiges of him around the island hoping to find clues as to how to deal with grief amid disaster.

'Ojalá nos encontremos en el mar' (Hopefully We'll Meet at Sea) is a photographic documentation of the psychological undercurrents of trauma that provoke suicides in the aftermath of Hurricane María. It looks closely at my own depression and the challenging emotions of grieving in barren, ravaged, sometimes unrecognizable environments. Landscapes tracing the collective traumatic memory of unprecedented disaster and the nostalgia of the places we once inhabited.

© Gabriella N. Báez - Image from the Ojalá nos encontremos en el mar photography project

The ocean was my father’s escape, his refuge. Papi has always been from the sea, the in-between. I remember watching him surfing on the horizon asking myself if he was scared, but now I wonder what he was thinking about. Observing me on land, his reality. And if his fear was coming back to it.

In geography they theorize that we learn by categorizing. In psychology they say we are a construction of what surrounds us. But what happens with the things that escape science, language, categories and its limits? What happens with all that doesn’t fit into theory? That which has no words? A warm sensation in the chest, a shiver, tense knees, curved spine, pain as deep as a stab.

Archeology of residue, what my father left behind.

I think life and its abyss gave my father a reason, Hurricane María gave him a noose, and now Puerto Rico is his tomb.

With each crisis I survive in this island-tomb, every time I watch it collapse and decompose, I try to understand myself in the middle of all this, as part of all this.

I’ve looked for answers not of why he left, instead of the things we were never able to solve. Where do I start?

Archeology of residue, what my Hurricane María left behind.

Everything is dark, I think I’m dead. I see my body from the outside.

My back is fractured, broken in pieces. I cry and scream resisting the worst sensations I’ve felt in my life, realizing that my suicide attempt had failed. I wake up with a gasp. Since then I feel the same pain beyond my sleep and dreams.

Sometimes I don’t know why I’m suffering, whether it is because my father is dead or because I live in his grave.

My country is a liminal space. The battle between being and not being. The endless, unobtainable search, the space without answers.

Now I tattoo grief on my chest, I submerge and I think hopefully we’ll meet at sea.

Ojalá nos encontremos en el mar

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