Gabriella N. Báez, Ojalá nos encontremos en el mar (Hopefully, We’ll Meet at Sea), 2018– 

Narrator: This audio stop addresses suicide. 

Gabriella N. Báez: My name is Gabriella Báez.

This project began in 2018, after my father died by suicide, just two months before the first anniversary of hurricane Maria. I started photographing his items as a way of recovering his memory, trying to connect with who he was, who he was in my life, and it's taken different variations and forms since then. 

After my father's funeral I was given a box of all his items, which included his favorite windsurfer necklace, the frame with an image of us in front of a pool, his cassettes, his albums, and his Pink Floyd shirt, which was his favorite. And I didn't know what to do with these items besides photographing them. I felt like I had to document them in some way, as a way to document who he was or pieces of who he was. I'm also a student of anthropology, or I graduated from anthropology, and so the idea of having an archeology of someone is what I was getting at when I put all these images together. Like, can we see who he was when we join all these items? Can we have a sense of who he was as a person?

I started to feel like it wasn't enough to just have these images and scan them, but I wanted to play with the idea of memory and connection. In what ways could I connect with the memories I had of him, with our past, with the relationship we had in the past. And that's when I started intervening these images with the red thread. Red, it was just the color that called me at the moment. This part of the project and experience was very intuitive and cathartic.