Remaining Witness

A foam-like patch is visible on the surface of the sea. I don’t know its nature, but it gives me a familiar feeling — a dread of something unknown and ominous. It may be full of living particles, yet it still carries death; suspended between the beautiful and the repulsive.

Where the mind cannot comprehend what it faces, it begins to imagine. At one moment, it resembles a floating carcass; at another, a white cloud that has suddenly descended upon the sea’s surface. This is the point where the image approaches abstraction, somewhere between sight and imagination, between reality and fantasy.

Beneath this whiteness, a streak of red is hidden—not clear enough to be certain, yet not faint enough to go unnoticed. It resembles blood; a trace of something that should have been forgotten but remains. The contradiction between the calm sea and what lies before our eyes stems from the absence of something unseen in the image but felt in its presence. The red stains left on the negative after film development intensify the imagination of blood streaks, as if memories of the sea have erupted onto the memory of the photograph.

I remember Icarus—not as in the legends, with passion for flight, but as depicted in Bruegel’s painting in the margin. His body is no longer visible; only his legs remain, sinking into the sea. No one watches, no one stops. The fall happens without an audience. This patch feels the same to me: a moment after the fall, the remnant moment after disappearance.

I think of the sea’s victims, of faded traces, of a crime scene that erases everything within it—even this patch. And the only thing left behind is the image: a witness to an imaginary death.