On Wednesday, September 14, 1988, between five and six in the afternoon, Hurricane Gilberto struck the Yucatán Peninsula, becoming the most devastating tropical cyclone to occur in the Atlantic Ocean during the 20th century. Sheltered in a commercial premises, the artist Omar Barquet and his family, protected by darkness and listening to a battery-powered radio broadcasting news—interrupted at length by periods of music—survived the hurricane.

Regarding this experience, Barquet has commented: “A large part of my time has been devoted to addressing certain imagery from my childhood, seeking to uncover some vital experience. In my case, it led me back to the stories of the hurricanes I lived through as a child, the time I spent safe inside a family-owned commercial space where the fierce wind battered the metal shutter, creating a strange and contrasting dialogue with the flashes of piano notes from Chopin’s Nocturnes emanating from that battery-powered radio—evoking night, landscape, silence, and the sea. For me, that was an amalgamation of elements that have endured in my memory and which I later consciously chose to interpret in my work.”

Since 2012, Omar Barquet has developed the extensive multidisciplinary project Ghost Variations. Presented through successive exhibitions that unfold like movements in a symphonic work, the overall structure of the project resembles the concentric circles of a vast spiral, representing both the meteorological stages of the cyclone and the subsequent biographical phases of the experience—including the natural, social, and psycho-affective devastation left in its wake.

In this way, the exhibition {elements} presents the vision the artist has been (re)constructing of the day after the disaster: the moment when the tide recedes, the sky clears, and the beach reveals the trail of destruction left by the storm—a marine cemetery composed of the numerous and random remnants and traces of the “hurricane of agony.” This visual and sonic wake occurs across the double horizon formed by past time and recovered memory.

Christian Barragán