Institution
TU Dublin
Medium
Print
Graduation Year
Class of 2026
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My publication explores the 2024 floods in Valencia through intertwined personal, collective, and media narratives, revealing how a single event can exist as many different truths. Rooted in my own experience of the floods, this work begins with memory, using lived experience as both a point of departure and a lens through which to understand the aftermath of environmental disaster. I am interested in the fragile space between what is remembered, what is witnessed, and what is reported. The flood arrived suddenly, disrupting the rhythms of everyday life, yet its presence lingered long after the water had receded. Through layered narratives, I explore how experiences of loss, uncertainty, and resilience become fragmented, reshaped, and carried differently by individuals, communities, and the media. The publication is built around primary photographs that I captured while volunteering in the clean-up effort after the floods. These images bear witness to the physical scars left behind, documenting landscapes altered by water and lives interrupted. Each photograph is accompanied by the exact date and time it was taken, emphasising the significance of time during moments of disaster. Time became both immediate and suspended—marking the unfolding of the catastrophe while quietly recording the long process of recovery. Each image is subtly distorted by a shifting waterline that runs throughout the publication. This intervention echoes the stains left behind on the buildings of Valencia, where the floodwaters etched a visible memory into the city's architecture. By disrupting the photographs in this way, I seek to evoke the lingering presence of the water, suggesting that the flood continues to exist not only in the landscape but also in memory. The waterline becomes both a physical trace and a metaphor, blurring the boundary between documentation and remembrance. At the heart of my practice is an exploration of the human capacity to endure. I reflect on the quiet strength that emerges in moments of crisis, where shared vulnerability gives way to acts of care, solidarity, and collective recovery. Alongside this, I consider the growing reality of climate change, not as a distant possibility but as a force that is already reshaping the landscapes we inhabit and the lives we lead. Ultimately, I see this publication as both a personal record and a collective reflection—a space where memory, grief, and hope coexist. It invites the viewer to consider not only what is lost in the wake of disaster, but also what remains: the resilience of people, the persistence of memory, and our evolving relationship with an increasingly unpredictable environment.
