Carlos Folgoso Sueiro’s Beyond the Lake turns Galicia’s fading landscapes into a haunting meditation on loss, belonging, and resilience, where memory seeps into every flooded stone and shadow.
The work drifts through landscapes of drought and desolation, where submerged villages rise from the depths and eucalyptus plantations swallow native forests. Yet beneath its melancholic tone lies an intimate excavation of belonging—an artist photographing his own reflection in the face of a disappearing world.
The series unfurls like a dream tinged with smoke. In Sueiro’s images, Galicia is rendered in chiaroscuro—haunted villages resurfacing under the weight of climate change, women in traditional dress poised between myth and modernity, and remnants of rural life caught in a slow dissolve. Each photograph feels inhabited by ghosts: emigrants who left, homes lost to fire, traditions eroded by industry. Through these tableaux, Sueiro captures not just a place but the texture of loss itself, the way history seeps into soil and water.
This is not reportage, but reverie. Having returned to Galicia after years abroad, Sueiro approaches the camera as a confessional tool. His process—slow, patient, deeply personal—mirrors the rhythms of the land he photographs. “To shoot from the inside, you must also shoot yourself,” he says. The result is a meditation on exile and return, where the boundaries between photographer and subject dissolve. In the silence of a flooded village or the solitude of an aging relative, he locates both collective memory and private grief.
The project’s emotional gravity is matched by its painterly precision. Sueiro’s visual language recalls the chiaroscuro of Rembrandt and the existential tone of Tarkovsky, yet remains distinctly rooted in Galician soil. The light, always shifting, feels like a character—sometimes oppressive, sometimes redemptive. It lingers on burned fields, abandoned homes, and the faces of those left behind. Even when darkness dominates, there is a quiet resilience: a reminder that endurance, too, can be a form of beauty.
Beyond the Lake is less a document of environmental crisis than a portrait of spiritual persistence. By weaving together environmental decay, familial memory, and cultural inheritance, Sueiro invites us to see Galicia as a mirror for the modern condition—fragile, dislocated, yet still capable of grace. His photographs stand as both elegy and invocation, searching for what remains beyond the surface of loss.
