The Mermaid's Wait
The Mermaid’s Wait is a video art short film documenting a multidisciplinary, site-specific audiovisual project created in Puerto Madryn, Patagonia, with other talented local artists.
Conceived as a poetic dialogue between the sea, landscape, and memory, the work explores the passage of time, transformation, and belonging. At its heart is a stranded ship, inhabited by a mermaid (its soul) who recalls past voyages and silently awaits the vessel’s return to the ocean and the beginning of a new chapter.
Combining underwater freediving imagery by Carpe Diem Holistic, original graphics and visual animations by Román Gomes, drone footage, and original music and live performance by Cuquex (Facundo Vázquez), the piece moves between surface and depth, dream and reality.
Created in a single night in collaboration with the local Port Authorities, Cuquex, and Lux Kodama (Joel Scott Hume and Román Gomes), the project transforms the ship into a living canvas of light, memory, and storytelling. Set in a disused industrial area of the port, the intervention seeks to bring renewed attention to an often-overlooked urban landscape, revealing the beauty, memories, and stories held within it. Through art, a forgotten place becomes a space for imagination, connection, and renewal: a contemplative visual poem about patience, transformation, and the possibility of seeing familiar places anew.
The Mermaid’s Wait emerged from a desire to listen to a place; to slow down and allow the landscape to speak. The stranded ship became a point of attention, a body holding memory, time, and transformation.
The team behind this short film was drawn to the idea that objects, like territories, carry invisible narratives. The mermaid (imagined as the soul of the vessel) embodies this inner life: a presence that remembers, observes, and waits without urgency.
Working with the rhythms of the tide, light, and environment, we approached creation as an act of listening rather than control. Through projections, movement, sound, and image, we sought to “artify” a space often overlooked, in order to reveal its poetic dimension and invite others to perceive it differently.
This work is part of an ongoing exploration of how art can reconnect us with place, memory, and the subtle relationships between body, landscape, and time.
It has been premiere at the “El Uno y la Belleza” Theatre in February 2026, and it is now participating to several film festivals. A public release will follow afterwards.
