The body, freed from its weight, with boundaries dissolved, surrenders as resistance fades. I Lost My Strength Underwater is a moment suspended between surrender and loss, a dialogue between the body and the sea where vastness becomes both refuge and release. Glez explores femininity as an act of embracing and surrender, a transition between strength and lightness, control and letting go.
Vastness is both vulnerability and liberation. The body dissolves into the ocean, breathing at its rhythm, surrendering to the water’s ebb and flow without resistance. Femininity emerges as a bridge to the sensitivity that binds us to the sea: transformation without defeat, surrender without loss.The sea does not merely receive; it holds and returns. In its depths, sinking is not a form of surrender but a way of existing without weight.
The work engages in a dialogue with femininity and mental health as acceptance processes: embracing, releasing, and inhabiting one’s body with the same natural ease with which water envelops it. It also reclaims a recycled aesthetic from the marine imaginary, where the contemporary and the ancestral converge in the vision of the ocean as both a matrix and a mirror. The photograph confronts the tension between surrender and permanence, fragility and resilience through its depth.
The piece is a paper photograph taken from a bird’s-eye view. In it, a woman submerged in crystalline waters floats, wrapped in a white tunic that dissolves with the movement of the sea. The filtered light and transparency reinforce the sensation of weightlessness, transforming the body into a suspended moment between the tangible and the ethereal.
This is a gesture of surrender, where lightness is not loss but transformation. In water, the body releases its weight and fuses with its reflection, reminding us that the sea holds us and returns what we leave in it. We must protect this legacy, for its fate is also our own. This is not only a surrender but an ecological call: the ocean’s destiny is the struggle for our existence.
María Pérez Marín
