Formentera (Spain), 2023

Between vastness and confinement, between what flows and what remains trapped, emerges that which suffocates. Glez, daughter of Yemayá, finds in the ocean both a spiritual refuge and the crystalline voice of her own being. From the depths, a silent cry: an urgent call to protect the oceans—and ourselves.

The work unfolds in three interwoven layers: the net, the body, and the sea. The net, abandoned by fishermen, drifts like a ghostly trap, ensnaring marine life and our indifference. A symbol of pollution that silences both the ocean and those who inhabit a world woven with its own restraints. The body, suspended and enclosed, embodies the shared fragility of nature and humankind—captive within its own mental entanglements. And the sea, immense and ambivalent, is both refuge and threat, origin and fate. The possibility of life and the shadow of destruction.

Among Nets is a meditation on ecology, a reflection of what is caught in the water and what confines us as a society. It confronts the tension between natural flow and human intervention, with the urgency to preserve the oceans as an act of self-care mirrored on their surface.

The use of the lightbox intensifies the sensation of entrapment and suspension. Illumination transforms the image into a threshold where the tangible and the ethereal merge. The net is cast over the skin, erasing the boundaries between the body and the trap, between the victim and its surroundings.

Among Nets forces us to face what we ensnare and what ensnares us—the fragility of natural balance and the urgency to act. It awakens in us the ancestral certainty that to preserve the ocean is to preserve our own existence, that every abandoned net is a scar upon the water, a knot in the history of our bond with the sea, a mirror where every captive creature is an omen of our own fate.

María Pérez Marín