Havana (Cuba), 2018

In the vastness of the sea, where the sky dissolves into the abyss, what does not belong rises to the surface. Ground Swell is a visual lament, a suspended testimony against the tide of oblivion.

Drifting bodies emerge as involuntary offerings, witnesses to a violence that water does not erase, symbols of a collective wound. The piece is a political tribute to those who, driven by desperation, entrusted their fate to the ocean— a mirror reflecting the very condition of humanity, which condemned them. Migrants with no arrival, victims of femicide, returned to the sea, a primordial womb turned into their final resting place.

In its tides, a double pulse where ecology and migration converge: the sea is not merely a landscape but a terrain of mourning and resistance. For this reason, the work unfolds in two fundamental pieces: Presence and Absence. In the first, the flesh is revealed, vulnerability laid bare before the viewer’s gaze— bodies floating, scattered like notes of an interrupted song. In the second, they have vanished, leaving only shadows on the surface, a spectral imprint of what once was and was torn away, a reflection of the impunity of a world that chose not to see.

The use of the lightbox intensifies the tension between presence and absence. Illumination does not merely reveal; it amplifies the contrast between the tangible and the spectral. The photograph ceases to be a mere capture and becomes a latent trace, a threshold where image and memory intertwine.

But the sea does not forget. Ground Swell is a liquid lament, a funeral song that rescues names from the current and restores the footprints meant to be erased. Between the foam and memory, the image endures. Because water, like history, does not bury— it returns.

María Pérez Marín