La Unión / Where the Light Bends is an ongoing photographic research project developed in and around Cahuita, an Afro-Caribbean community on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. Working across portraiture, landscape, oral history, archival research, poetry and experimental writing, the project examines how memory, migration, ecology and belonging are transmitted between people, images, language and place.

One of its conceptual points of departure can be traced to Lágrimas Negras: an ode to Yemayá, commissioned for the Mauritshuis exhibition FLASH | BACK (2022) and subsequently entering the museum’s collection. Extending questions already present within Thierry’s practice around family, kinship and inheritance, La Unión / Where the Light Bends considers transmission more broadly: how knowledge and memory move through generations, communities, landscapes, stories, images and institutions.

At its centre is an inquiry into photography as a form of knowledge. Rather than treating the photograph as the conclusion of research, the project considers the image as a point of departure—capable of initiating conversations, generating questions and acquiring new meanings through encounter, return and reinterpretation.

Developed through sustained relationships in Cahuita, this methodology brings historical evidence into conversation with oral testimony, personal memory, folklore and ecological observation without treating these forms of knowledge as interchangeable. A photograph may lead to an oral history; testimony may complicate an archival record; folklore may preserve a relationship to place that documentary evidence cannot fully contain. Their encounters and contradictions become part of the work.

Writing is integral to this inquiry rather than supplementary to the photographs. Poetry, prose and fragmentary forms of writing operate as research methods: ways of approaching what an image may leave unresolved, while allowing photographs in turn to complicate or exceed what language can describe. Image and text are not required to authenticate one another.

The same principle informs the project’s approach to portraiture and landscape. People and places are not treated as subjects that photography must make entirely legible. The work allows for opacity, contradiction and what remains beyond representation. Sea, forest and coastline similarly move beyond functioning as background, becoming living environments through which histories of migration, ecology, labour, memory and belonging continue to unfold.

The institutional trajectory of Lágrimas Negras introduces another question. A work created through an encounter with a historical museum collection subsequently became part of that collection itself. Acquisition may stabilize an artwork as an object—catalogued, preserved and interpreted—without necessarily stabilizing its meaning.

Photographs, Polaroids, cyanotypes, moving image, field recordings, archival material, poetry and prose therefore form an evolving body of relations rather than a single authoritative account of place.

La Unión / Where the Light Bends ultimately asks who is able to produce, preserve, interpret and authorize photographic knowledge—and what becomes possible when an image continues to generate meaning after it has been made, exhibited or collected.