Cantabria (Spain), 2025

A video-performance that unites two rituals born from the ocean: the tribute of surfers in Cantabria to their deceased companions and the Yoruba tradition of offerings to Yemayá, mother of the oceans and guardian of life.
In the Yoruba religion, the sea is a sacred body, a space of transition where flowers, fruits, and prayers are offered to ask for health, protection, and strength. In Cantabria, surfers bid farewell to their own by forming a circle in the water, allowing the sea to receive their memory.
In this work, a group of women dressed in black enters the water on white boards. They form a circle, take each other’s hands, and let flowers fall into the ocean. Meanwhile, the artist remains on the shore, observing, holding the ritual, like a bridge between both worlds.
After completing the gesture, the women return to the sand. There, they place their boards on the ground and form the circle once more, this time around the artist. Standing, in silence, with the sea at their backs, they seal the closure of the ritual.
From the aerial perspective of a drone, the circle on the water and the circle on the sand become symbols of transition and return, of what is given and what is received.
“Water Circle” is an act of memory, an offering, and a farewell. In the sea, life and death are not opposites: they are the same current, the same pulse that unites us in the vastness of the water.

Charleen Capote