Family

The Belgian seaside is covered in cement. As a child I remember the boardwalk in Koksijde and how I spent → a lot of time looking at the ocean. I remember swimming with my grandmother in the sea; she would play with me in the cold waves for hours.

L.M.The ocean was always there. It was very present. It’s part of the world in which I grew up. I come from a fisherman’s family → so even though the ocean is more of a space of leisure for me, for my family it is more connected to labor.

In Portugal you can fish mainly cod and sardines. My uncle used to go out for days and days with big industrial ships to fish. I remember going with my mother to the harbor to see him when he returned.

My mother told me that my grandfather was an alcoholic and when he got drunk he became very aggressive. So the family would → escape to the shore. They had a primitive relationship to it, they considered it their savior. Moreover, they used to catch lobster and octopus to eat because those are the things that they could get on the rocks. Back then you could still find crabs on beach. My mom helped with making nets.

In Portugal, swimming was very much a class thing. People only knew how to swim if they went to swimming classes. Those kinds of people, that could afford swimming classes, see the ocean as a space for leisure. But for poor people like my family, the ocean was seen as labor + not necessarily as leisure. It still is the case with some people. There is another mode of relation towards it. For poor people, it’s not just about labor but about hard labor. For some it is as if they don’t have the right to pleasure. Pleasure is located in the family for them.

My family would spend each Christmas holiday period camping beside the ocean beach on the coast. The family home was right on a bay beach, so we experienced both sea and ocean worlds throughout the year. These beach holidays were quite adventurous in terms of experience and activities.

I have a nephew who’s really into surfing and at 14 years of age, he saved the life of a father and his daughter who were being pulled out to sea by the undertow. And who would of very likely drowned had my nephew not brought them to shore on his surfboard. This heroic and mythological deed made the front page of the local newspaper.

During my first year in art school, I spent three weeks on an ocean cruise with my mother and sisters. There was a major breakout of the flu throughout the ship and variations of the same flu circulated around the ship so that I was constantly ill with a different range of symptoms during the entire cruise. The ship literally became, for me anyway, like Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead and which was by chance, a book I found in the ship's library. I read it locked up in my cabin only going out when we docked on a new island, and where I would stumble around with a horrible fever too weak to actually know what to do and where to go.

I learned to swim by trying to swim 10 strokes, one after the other, if I managed I would get a small reward from my mother.

My grandparents had a house by the sea in the Netherlands. It was in Zeeland, a part of Holland, which is → close to the sea. → We used to sit in those wooden cabins near the sea. I remember that at night, you could see little larvae that lit up in the water.

My mother → was (born on) an island but I had few connections to the ocean myself.

My mother grew up in the West Indies. My family doesn’t know how to swim. I was “taught” how to swim in school essentially by being thrown into the swimming pool (and being left to fend for myself). When I was going there for vacations, we would have mainly picnics on the beach with my family, and I used to go into the water – but only up to my knees. I slowly taught myself to swim but swam like a “small dog” (as they say in French).

About 2 years ago, my relation to the ocean became better because of my son who is 9 years old. He is learning how to swim in the swimming pool in Brussels. On the days where I pick him up, I jump into the water with him and he teaches me some basic movements of the hands and feet.

I used to spend vacation time in Martinique. I prefer the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean. Nowadays, I can play with my son + my dog in the sea → they can both swim better than me. I feel joy when I encounter the ocean now, because I experience it through my son’s eyes. The experience of weightlessness and buoyancy is what fascinates me the most.

I have fisherfolk in my family but they don’t know how to swim.

Some people from the generation of my mother and before came to France from the West Indies by boat. Like the European migrants arriving at Ellis Island. And I often wonder what it would feel like to sail for days and days on the ocean without seeing the shore + then, suddenly, seeing it. You’re starting a new life somewhere new but at the same time you’re in the middle of nowhere (during the crossing).

I never knew my father → he was away a lot. I would see him for two days every eight days. So I chose to work in the school because I wanted to see my children grow up.

In the old days, there was no connection with the shore during the journey. Our families would ask us: When do you come back? And we’d say: We don’t know yet. Because it’s not possible to plan on the sea. Because you never know what will happen. You should never say how long a journey is going to take. As a skipper, you should never show that you have negative thoughts.