Barlavento
Windward

Something happened in this insular land.
However, some questions around this experience hover: how is it that a place can activate memories that seem so real it is as if we had lived there? How can the knowledge and temporal legacy of the diaspora, given its inherent lacunae and erasures, be expressed? How is it that everyday objects, places and subtleties can activate this practice inscribed in the body?
Intrigued by such questions - which arose when I first visited the Cape Verde islands, I try in the immersive photographic project Barlavento to embrace the visual duality of finding commonalities between lived experience and the commonplace, between displacement and belonging, and between the distant and the familiar.
Through an ongoing photographic diagram begun in 2020, this series tests the limits of unconscious experience in an attempt to translate into a visual form something that cannot be explained verbally, not because of an absence of words, but because of the need to find a way of communicating that encompasses all the intensities, sensations and conditions of feeling a sense of familiarity with something unfamiliar.
Much like a jigsaw puzzle, I see these photographic experiences as portals that hold within them spaces that are dreamlike, commonplace, and - above all - intense, and that can reconnect us with times that differ from our own stories and narratives. What is it that the experience of wonder in a dream lived in reality can tell us / contribute?
While still in the realm of questioning, Barlavento is a project in development that is articulated through an experiment of speculative fiction on the possibility of bringing together memory, family and history. Here, the act of photographing is less about image production, and more about a response to this reaction. A composition in which photography is also a notebook for a living narrative. An opportunity for openness in ways of feeling and acting.
Crossing and displacement as a revelation of the mystery: the landscape.