Return. Although you can never really go back anywhere. Return. Although we are no longer the same. Return. Although no one is waiting for us. Return. Although that place bears no trace of our memories. Return.

The narratives surrounding the idea of returning, particularly returning home, are among the most powerful in history. From the girl who clicks her ruby slippers longing for a return to the man who travels from island to island longing for a return, the force of this narrative path persists and expands ever outward. We go out into the world and construct narratives about ourselves, which naturally have as their starting point—to which they so often return—that space we call home. However, sometimes returning home is also returning to a place filled with emotion. For others, returning home is reconnecting with the “I” we were when we inhabited that space. In other words, coming home appears to us as a return to our essence, to that purest “I.” Returning home is also returning to our own truth.

The artist and documentarian Yadira Hernández-Picó invites us to enter the intimate space of a painful return. Her detailed documentation of the lives and stories of the residents of the Indieras neighborhoods in the municipality of Maricao confronts us with the traumatic experience of returning home after the passage of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico. The literalness of this narrative—the characters returning to what was once their home only to discover an entire landscape that is utterly transformed—drains any metaphorical value we may ascribe to the return when faced with this dimension of catastrophic reality: They have returned home, but the house is gone. They have returned home, but nothing is as it was. The home that always was has now set off on its own journey, carried by the winds. The narrative is shattered, return is literally impossible.

From the vantage point of photojournalism, the series of 24 images that comprise this exhibition presents us with a humanistic view of an environment and its inhabitants. The result also reveals the creative and documentary processes of the artist, who uses photography to document the fact that she has been to each spot numerous times and has patiently waited for the most judicious moment to take her photographs. In the gestures and expressions of the subjects, it is possible to detect the trace of the human encounter that preceded the image. These are not passive subjects who fix their gaze toward the camera or let themselves be lost in the surroundings; these are people who know that they are being narrated and that the process of narration will build upon their own narrative of return. The same thing happens when we look at windows opening outward to a landscape. We not only see them, but we see what they see. Their stories and their gaze intersect.

Sometimes, even amid the cruelest adversity, it is not until we piece together the story of the tragedy, that we can move on and transform it. Retelling it to ourselves and having it then retold legitimizes our existence in some way, dignifies the silences, and gives a body and a face to our history. But beyond this value, through the series of images, it is possible to see much more than “the face of tragedy” or “go beyond the statistics,” as they say in the media. Through the images, we begin down the path of that return to the home lost after the hurricane, which is also our own home. By immersing ourselves in these landscape images, we relive the feeling of that morning after the disaster when we went out to open paths that were impossible to recognize. In the intimacy of this landscape, we also find our own landscape.

Hernández-Picó problematizes yet strengthens and brings nuance to her work through the integration of two different text formats: the first-person testimony and the third-person narration by the author, thereby creating something of a triangulated narrative, with the three legs of a complex globe of this world presented through three elements (image, testimony, narration). This format, very typical of the narratives generated by the Internet and social networks, triggers a ricochet between each of the elements that, in turn, allows us to put together a narrative structure based on our own reading. There will be those who start off with the image, while others will arrive via the narratives—or return to any of the three elements with a new perspective. In this narrative triangle of text and image, both the abstract register—the letter emptied of meaning—and the realistic come into play. And it is precisely at this midpoint—the one that arises between the subjectivity of the framing of the photographs, and the blunt honesty of the testimonies—that the possibility of accessing the truth of the protagonists’ lives can be found. A part of the whole, a micro world to understand the broader world that we inhabit.

The exhibition, in turn, constructs a macro story, since the artist also returns home and, in an unexpected moment, we discover that one of the images is a depiction of her childhood home, her mother's home, the repository of her memories among these same neighborhoods of Maricao. It is then that we understand that, by accompanying each of the subjects on their return home, it is possible for our narrator to also reach her starting point. By intertwining her encounters with the residents of her town with her own memories, slowly but surely, we also accompany her on a reencounter with her own past.

As part of this common thread, we also discover the will of the author to document and report. “I didn't know why or what for, but I knew I had to do it,” Hernández-Picó would say months after working on this project, about the force that impelled her to go, day after day, house after house, accompanying and documenting the stories of this handful of Puerto Ricans who reveal a drop of truth amid the ocean of stories that make up the cataclysm of Hurricane Maria. Why do it then? Why more photos and more accounts of the disaster? Because we also have the right to our own tragedy, we also have the right to appropriate it.

The work also adds to the long line of stories that reaffirm the saying (attributed to Leo Tolstoy): “If you want to be universal, start by painting your own village”.

In this town, there is abandonment, loneliness, innocence, love, faith, pain, and truth—all themes of unquestionable universality. In turn, in this work, what is not revealed is also striking. We do not see the face of the documentary filmmaker, but we make use of her narrative approach and her visual framework to enter this world. And even so, we do wind up discovering—as we have indicated—that, when we embark on this visual journey, we are also accompanying the author on her return home. If we stop at any image, we will have the certainty that in those faces, in those destroyed houses, and in this painful return, we will also inevitably find our own home that the hurricane took from us. In all villages and neighborhoods, we encounter what is our own, what is intangible, and what is memory.

(Translation from Spanish by David Auerbach)