Today, Ons is part of the Atlantic Islands of Galicia National Park, where conservation efforts are underway. But human activity, especially tourism, still threatens its fragile ecosystem. The island’s Roman past is a powerful reminder of how unsustainable resource use can leave lasting damage, and why development must be balanced with protecting nature for future generations. The island of Ons has undergone various power dynamics throughout its history. In Ancient times, it was conquered by several groups: Vikings, Moors, Romans. Later, it was passed from one powerful family to the next until it eventually came to be owned by the Church. The state then expropriated the island for national defence, there were plans to establish an international submarine base, a military base, and even a salt preservation factory. In the 1940s and 1950s, the island reached its highest population, with 500 inhabitants. In 2002, it was declared a national protected park; the islanders were dispossessed from their homes and lands, and everything started to changed.
Alejandro Reiriz Pouseu
areirizpouseu@gmail.com
@pozila
areirizpouseu@gmail.com
@pozila
The heart in the centre
slightly displaced to the left,
like the lighthouse in the middle of the island,
slightly displaced
to the left.
slightly displaced to the left,
like the lighthouse in the middle of the island,
slightly displaced
to the left.
Poem by Andrea Reiriz Pouseu, 2024.
Somewhere in London, or somewhere in the UK.
to my ancestors.
I have to tell you something. You won't believe what I found yesterday. I was going through my box of “really deep stuff” and I found this silly letter I wrote to “El Rantoncito Perez” when I was 9 (Tooth Mouse - the Spanish version of The Tooth Fairy). I remember it like it was yesterday, I put my shiny tiny tooth - it looked like a pearl - under my pillow with the letter. And in the letter, it said: “please, Ratoncito, turn me into a mermaid tomorrow morning. I know you are a magic mouse, Ratoncito, please let me be a mermaid in Ons. I know you can do it. I believe in you, Perez. Omg, and I even drew myself as a mermaid to show Ratoncito how important becoming a mermaid was for me. I also had loads of friends underwater: fishes, sharks, anemones and even shells! Like you! I deeply thought one of those shells was my grandma.
You are everything to me.
You mean so much to me. Writing to you feels like tracing a line back to the very beginning of who I am. You make my world better just by existing in my memory, in my hands, in the stories that move through me. I can feel you deep inside me. I am descended from you, from the marks you created, from the land and sea that made you possible. And like you, we islanders have always been resilient, holding onto our rocky ground until history pries us open. The island shaped this resilience. It shaped the way generations stayed, left, returned, or carried the island with them in silence. It shaped the way you learned to live with the changes that came from the outside, and the way you held everything inside until youcouldn’t anymore.
I have learnt since you’ve been gone, Shell, that what hides inside you is not just fragile, it was waiting to burst. And it is bursting now. Bursting in layers of time, bursting in ruins, bursting in the colours that still live in the memory of your body. The purple dye that was taken from millions of shells like you still stains history, even if the hands that crushed you are long gone. Your shape remains as a souvenir of what extraction leaves behind.
Ons island, once a home, is now a memory cradled in ruins,
And what are ruins, if not the shells of the past?
They are telling us the island is better off without us,
But if that’s true, then who are the ruins for?
They are telling us the island is better off without us. But if that’s true, then who are the ruins for? I keep returning to that question because longing is the place where answers gather for me. Longing, nostalgia, and homesickness are not states I escape; they are now how I think. They are now how I remember. They are how I understand the island and everything it held. Since I moved to this country, I realised this is my commitment: to let longing guide my remembering; to let nostalgia carry what history tries to erase.
To dream of you is to understand secrecy.
To carry you around is to carry time, pain, beauty, and silence.
I carry you because you are my ancestor, you are my warning.
You are the reason I dream, and doing this is a radical act.
Your life was shaped by the island’s isolation. It shaped how your parents and grandparents survived. It shaped the land that was cultivated to the limits of the sea. It shaped the houses built by hands that were expected to stay intact. It shaped the rituals, the gatherings, the voices that filled all the paths and forests in our land. It shaped the grief of seeing all of that being regulated and eventually taken away. Your life was also shaped by ancient extraction, by a history that required your body to be pried open. You witnessed a past where your insides were taken and your emptiness left behind. You lived through forms of taking; what remained of both of you were traces, stories, shapes, memory.
And so I speak, I gather, I carry, I remember.
The island might be gone, but I am still here.
You no longer have a voice, so I speak for you.
Our voices, like your dye, may not be meant for emperors.
But they stain.
They stay.
The island I carry is both the island of my grandparents and the island of my imagination. It is the island where this love letter - one of multiples - take place. It is the island where my grandmother’s life unfolded, and where the shell once lived in the sea below. It is the island where ruins rest like unanswered questions and ghosts pilgrimage. It is the island that winter empties and winter fills at the same time.
Longing is a winter emotion.
Winter is when all voices return.
Winter is when the island is almost silent, and yet full of memory.
Winter is when the lighthouse stands, when no one is commuting, when the island speaks without interruption.
All this homesickness I feel has become a way of thinking, of carving, of remembering it. I feel like it is an intervention in the end, not in the archaeological sense, but in the personal, that seeks listening to where I belong. Who is left out, who tells the stories of it... my intervention is speculative. I am constantly imagining the voices that were ignored while I carved all the histories that were folded. For me, myth-making is not an escape; it is a return. It is a way of entering layered histories. It is a way of honouring stories that were held, abandoned, loved, extracted, protected, and mourned.
Your stories are layered in the same way:
your shell, your family, the ruins, the stones, the cliffs, the abandoned boats, the seabed where you once lived. The island, the neighbourhoods, the ones who cultivated the land, the sea, the people who fought to stay, the stories that passed down through your voices.
I name and I search in order to understand.
To transmute the wound.
To make sense of the world.
To walk with nostalgia and, in doing so, I find life.
I write as a grandson, and I understand the world as a brother,
I search as a son now that I no longer transmute as father.
I am always grateful through writing, and I try to celebrate life through reading,
And sometimes by getting my hands dirty.
I do it all for you: for the sea, for my grandparents, and for those who are - and those who are no longer - surrounded by the sea.
I know you were emptied long ago.
I know one day you will live only in my imagination.
The island, too, is becoming a memory, slowly, like the tide pulling everything back. But love does not disappear.
Love stains.
Love stays.
Love remembers.
I think I was born too late to be a shell.
But not too late to love you.
Not too late to carry you.
Not too late to write you into this world so that you are never forgotten.
Many of the images shown are mine, Alejandro Reiriz Pouseu, or my sister’s, Andrea Reiriz Pouseu.. Many others are by Staffan Morling, some recovered from the book by María José Otero Acuña; and from Enric Villanueva, Suso Framil, Gustav Henningsen and Xoan Arco da Vella.
December 2025
London, UK
About to graduate... I AM SCARED!
DO I LIKE THIS COUNTRY? OR DO I WANT TO GO BACK HOME AND LIVE IN THE ISLAND?
HELP ME DIARY, PLEASEEE!!!!!!!!
Since I moved to another country, I have stopped feeling the ground as I used to. My feet no longer get dirty when I walk. My tongue has changed its shape, its form; it no longer has the shape it had before, like an island. Now, it is long and stretched, tense and firm. I struggle to express what comes naturally to me. I cannot explain what it means for me to feel my feet on the ground or to have my tongue rooted to my body. Language is part of our body and our home. It is a natural faculty, facility, its rhythms and vibrations shaping our physical form. The shape of my mouth is part of my ecology. Words are like minerals. Language is an ecosystem.
Today specially, I miss my grandmother SO MUCH. I miss her stories, She always knew how to keep stories alive without repairing or fixing anything. She never separated history from everyday life. For her, the past wasn’t far away; it lived inside gestures and sobremesas; the same way she’s always taken the very same seat on the ferry to Ons, all her life. ISN’T THAT CRAZY? Her stories didn’t try to be accurate or organised. I ADMIRE HER SO MUCH. Her stories preserved ambiguity, they held multiple truths at once! They were a way of keeping knowledge alive without turning it into something static. For us - me and her - storytelling was a bodily practice, something linked to repetition, to lineage, to survival. ACTUALLY MY DAD TAUGHT ME THAT. Knowledge passed from womb to womb, body to body. That’s how I learned about Ons before I researched anything.
Through her.
I think about my grandmother whenever I read about the island’s history. The dye production, the abandoned Roman pools, the medieval myths, the attempts to turn Ons into a military base, the salting factory that brought my family there, the expropriations, the protests, the neighbourhood association, the land rights still unresolved... SOOOO MANY THINGS! When academics describe these things, they describe them chronologically, but in my family, these events don’t sit in a straight line, they overlap, they repeat, and of course show up in conversations the same way seasons show up on the island. My grandmother’s mother, Rosa, lived her entire life on the island. Her husband is buried there. She is not. She wasn’t allowed to be when the island became a protected park and suddenly people who had lived there for generations were treated as if their homes were unlawful. WHY IS THIS COMMODIFICATION, THIS ACCUMULATION BY CONSERVATION, ONLY DEFENDS THE FAUNA AND FLAURA WHEN THE ISLANDERS WERE PART OF THE ISLANDS ECOLOGY FOR CENTURIES!
It is really scary when you start understanding everything...
These are stories I grew up hearing. Sometimes, I think the island is telling these stories too. The wind carries them, the cliffs hold them, the ruins repeat them, THE GHOSTS! Even Google Earth shows me things that feel like messages. Once, I found a strange shape on the land that no one—no archaeologist, no neighbour, no scientist—could explain. I kept staring at it thinking: is this a shell? Is this someone’s trace? Is this a memory marked into the land? I don’t know. But it felt like the island speaking in a language I no longer fully understand.
I recently had a dream that felt like another version of this. I was in my room, having a pyjama party with load of people, and I was in my bed writing something desperate and in conversation with my grandmother, and my sister Andrea was there, and my friends Anna, Kali, Annie and Jessica were there. Oh! And Lotta Petronella was there, and the Virgin Stella Maris, you know LOL. And Darwin – so fucking weird haha... And Alice from Wonderland was there... and Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing. All and all these people are sort of animating my flesh, changing the body I guess I thought it was mine, helping me translate my words when my English is not Englishing… I WOULD LOVE TO FADE INTO MY WORDS, AND DISAPPEAR, AND BE CARRIED BY THE WIND. And all of this might not manifest itself anywhere other than here, in this exact moment, right now, YOU READER reading a text on how to be so small that you could be carried by the wind – or the sea.. But first I want to publish this. And I want people to read me, and listen to me. And make exhibitions AND LECTURES and explain why this island is so important…. They were there to help me translate myself when my ENGLISH WASN’T ENGLISHING. They were animating my flesh, reshaping the body I thought was mine. I remember thinking in the dream: “I want to fade into my words and disappear. I want to be carried by the wind. And explain why this island is so important to me. I want people to understand that Ons is not a landscape. IT IS A NARRATOR!!!!!!!!”
I WANT TO BE AN ARTIST AND A RESEARCHER SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO BAD
Ons holds layers of time that don’t cancel each other out. There are shell middens. Roman pools. Castros. Stories about hermit monks. Tales about portals inside the Cova dos Mouros. Marks on the land no one can describe. Houses that are falling apart because people aren’t allowed to fix them. The harbour that everyone keeps waiting to be repaired. The islanders’ fight for property rights. The fire incidents. The elders leaving in winter because it’s not sustainable anymore. The tourists arriving in summer. All of this exists at the same time. Ons is not an empty island or a paradise, it is a place full of conflicts, memories, abandonment, and return.
And now I am thinking about my practice and what makes me an artist, and a researcher and a storyteller... and all of this sits inside that mixture. I am constantly working with longing, with homesickness, with repetition, with gaps, with speculation like it’s a DRUG. I use archive materials, ruins, shells, family photos, oral histories, Google Earth screenshots. I write as a way to document what is disappearing. I make exhibitions because I want to show that the island is not isolated; it is connected to EVERYTHING! TO THE WORLD! I return to the shell because it feels like an ancestor; the shell holds history in all its layers, in its spiral structure, in the silence of its interior. I can hear all its ghosts coming from its core.
WHY CAN’T I WORK WHEN I GO BACK HOME BUT WHEN IM IN LONDON IT’S ALL IDEAS AND WORDS?! Writing about Ons from afar feels like weaving. Going back and forth. Being connected but disconnected. Being there but being here. Storytelling and writings becomes a way of keeping the past alive even when the place itself changes. It becomes a way of resisting erasure. Of refusing to let our stories become tourist material or colonial museum texts. When I write from longing, I am keeping the knowledge of the islanders alive. When I write about my grandmother, I am preserving a type of knowledge that is political even if she never wanted that. When I write about shells or ruins, I am doing “speculative archaeology” in my own way. I often think about why I insist on returning to these stories... maybe because they are the only way I have to stay connected to the island when I’m far away. Maybe because storytelling, making art and writing about it is my method of staying rooted. Maybe because this is how my grandmother taught me to understand the world: through stories that regenerate themselves every time they are told. Through memories that don’t need to be perfect to be true and REAL. Through the idea that the past is not gone; it’s WAITING TO BURST and FOR US TO LISTEN.
What I know is that Ons is not simply where my family comes from, it is part of how
I think,
how I write,
how I speak,
how I cook,
how I move,
how I breath,
how I hug,
how I kiss,
how I eat,
how I drink,
how I laugh,
how I read,
how I wonder,
how I wander,
how I swim,
how I sleep,
how I love.
And maybe writing this, is a way of returning. Not fully. But enough to feel the ground again, even if only for a moment.
Murex Seashells,
I LOVE YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
Con todo mi amor a la isla, al cuerpo, a las conchas, y a mi abuela. Tuve que irme lejos para poder escribir sobre ti.
Alejandro Reiriz Pouseu
@pozila