Dive into Cape Town's wetsuit factory
Month: juillet 2024
Certain dreams are made of fantasies and aspirations, others are made of neoprene and memories.
My mother was a textile designer and as a child I would play for hours in her atelier, surrounded by walls covered in shelves on which spools of colourful threads were organised professionally. In my mind, those spools were keeping two watchful, benevolent eyes over me, from the height of their home and the diversity of their threads’ thickness, texture, material and colour. Places that transpire creative processes as such evoke a strong sense of home to me.
Thirty years have passed since I played under my mother’s spools’ eyes and I have, perhaps unexpectedly, become a freediving instructor. I thread with every breath a lifelong story of underwater wonderment and made acquaintance with the temper, personalities, and attitudes each water body has welcomed me in, to connect with the marine beings whose home they are.
As a keen yet hardly insulated woman, I mutate into my aquatic self by slipping into an underwater second skin, namely a neoprene wetsuit. In order for me and many others to get there, into that second skin, master mind of Coral Factory Elaine and her eighteen employees – all women but two men – make magic with their hands. They import one ton of neoprene sheets yearly and turn them into 500 new items approximately, including the tailor-made freediving wetsuit I needed and came to the factory to watch the finishes of.
This second skin is the door I walk into my double life with: the water life. A life of no rules but of great sense, in which mystic spirals curl into waves at the surface of the sea and passing silvery shimmers lure one’s attention below the surface.
To be standing in the liminal space of the shore, sheets of neoprenes were cut according to measurements and patrons, into pieces that were then sticked together and sown where necessary. Past the fitting test, minor adjustments perfected my other being and after collecting my payment and happily sending me on my next adventure in her singing Scottish accent, Elaine admits that she won’t be joining. She doesn’t dive.
Dressed as such in my blue mind, immersed under the fronds of the magical African sea forest, echoes of my peaceful heart beat resonate in the form of meaningful thoughts, spreading like droplets do as they percolate into the ocean’s infinity. Rays of lights remind me of beauty and elegance, as water spirits birth new melodies in the voices of my mind for me to sing back on land. The contagious underwater enchantment morphs into unleashed creativity, not unlike an omen to being in our old home – in my childhood memory of my mother’s spool’s eyes as much as in the enchanted world my second skin lets me live my double life in.
