“Tree of Hope, Remain Strong”, says Frida Kahlo through a painting from 1947. This affirmation of will is desperately linked to our time of boundless speed, of a literally still life, of qualified absences.

Contained in a sort of series of stages created through the camera and a woman who tries to fit in them, Julieta Anaut acts as a material for her own creation, offering her body to the character who was born from a mermaid, expelled from her habitat, thrown at her fate and forced to wander as a member of two worlds.

Are we where we wanted to be? Have we broken the magical chain of events that used to leave us exactly there? Sea Exile is a present portrait of that concrete feeling that springs up from the skin and attempts a journey from the imposed to the natural, from “evolution” to the primal.

The ocean, an omnipresent witness of this never-ending source of expression, becomes just a prologue of a fate colored by chance and a mission: to take a symbol of love and truce to an alien, remote place, without the calm of its starting point.

Emilce Schedel, Buenos Aires, 2009.

Curatorial text of the series for the solo exhibition ‘Destierro del mar’ at Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, 2009.