Year 2023, during my father’s hospitalization and later passing, my sister writes her graduating thesis rhizophora, which writes of the rhizome and mangrove as a wealth of roots, both origin and outcome, neither beginning nor end, a continuous middle from which it grows and which it overspills. It connects the Caribbean identity to its landscape, inhibiting diffraction, the mangrove, the sea of wandering: to ambiguity, to fragility, to drifting, contrary to futility. To be rhizomatic is to exist as a multiplicity, outside of time, space, language. 

After my father’s death, we planted him as a Ceiba tree in the mountains of Cayo, Belize. The Maya worldview holds trees as living, sacred beings– the Ceiba linking the underworld, human world, and heavens. There was nothing left of him besides the ashes that bore the tree, nourished by gifts of cigarettes and gin & tonic. When we had the funeral we were told it was cruel to separate a waterman from the sea that raised him. Eduard Glissant coins the term ‘anti-space,’ claiming the Caribbean identity resides in anti-spaces like the Ocean.

 The mangrove’s roots form from erosion and natural disaster, both above ground and submarine, drifting, multiplying, wandering, joining horizons. Like its landscape, the Caribbean is formed from grief. In separation from the landscape, I continuously attempt to find connections to myself, but there is nothing to grasp onto. What’s left is a body and a New England forest, both which do not belong for me. So am I able to make them mine? Or will I rot in the process?

In this body of work I attempted to embody and use the New England landscape as one of Belize. In the process, my body started to mutilate and reject it. The print of my feet show a condition called ‘Raynaud’s Phenomenon,’ common to people from tropical climates when exposed to the cold. The condition causes small arteries to spasm, causing discoloration, loss of blood flow, and numbness in your fingers and toes. In each of these prints, if you look close enough,  it holds a sense of struggle, discomfort, gracelessness. These prints work in a space without structure, time, sequence. They are fragmented, obscured, plural. They are the attempts at anti-space. 

In creating this body of work, I reminisce anti-spaces. I think about the nickname my father would call me, ‘tadpole,’ which is nurtured in water and released on land, my association to the ocean as a womb, and how I learned to swim before walk. I could never fear water. My first memory of its tenderness at age five, hours from land in water so black you can’t see the water as you tread. We are there to see whale sharks but I am too young for a wetsuit and tank, so I stretch out my toes into the waves as I tear off my turquoise goggles. I want to unify with the black tar of the sea. I sink into the abyss as white dots emerge below me. I feel both everything and nothing at once. I find seduction in its mystery, and peace in its ambiguity. I long to be held in its secrets.  Today, in finding anti-spaces, the only thing I seem to find at the end of the trail is shame and grief with no vibration to fall. I believe most of the time these areas of anti-space have been blurred from me. That without my father, there is nothing left to bridge me to the rhizome, and in pursuit to find any remnants of what is left, in the end I am denied entrance, for I will not be forgiven for the sins I have committed in his absence. 

These photographs are a combination of digital, 120 color film, and 35mm B&W through utilization of the medium format Hasselblad, Nikonos V Underwater Film SLR, and Canon Mark 5D. In honor of the rhizome it is chaotic, scattered, heterogeneous, grippling for form.