A dive in Cape Town's Coral wetsuit factory
Month: décembre 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, 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 the water life in from that liminal space, the shore. A life of no rules but of senseful meaning, in which waves curl like mystic spirals at the surface of the sea. Passing silvery shimmers lure one’s attention below the surface.
Sheets of neoprenes were cut into pieces, guided by measurements and patrons, then sticked and stitched together. At the fitting test, minor adjustments perfect my water skin, and after collecting my grateful payment, Elaine sends me on my next adventure in her singing Scottish accent. She won’t be joining, she doesn’t dive.
Later on, dressed in the wetsuit and in my blue mind, I find myself immersed under the fronds of the magical African sea forest. Echoes of my heart beat at peace resonate in the form of meaningful thoughts. Echoes 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, where underwater enchantment morphs into unleashed creativity. Like an omen to being in our old home – as in my childhood memory of my mother’s spool’s eyes, as in the enchanted world my second skin lets me live my double life in.
