Tall is her body

Dominica, take me by the guts, make love to me, swallow me through your lands, devour me with your waves, bury me in your leaves, hide my limbs in your rivers, give my flesh to the fish and the crabs, destroy me, take my life, you, the powerful one, you, the seductress, make me be reborn in your veins.

I have been photographing the island of Dominica since 2022. I arrived the first time by chance; today, I return several times a year. The series “Tall is her body” (2022–2026) brings together documentary portraits, staged scenes, and landscapes, complemented by performative video works that construct both a portrait of Dominica’s identity and an inquiry into sensuality and desire. At its core, this project is a love story. How could I fall in love with a land so far from the forests of my childhood? How is it that I feel homesick every time I leave?

I first encountered Dominica forty-four years after its independence from British colonial rule, and five centuries after Christopher Columbus sighted it from his ship on a Sunday – stripping away its Indigenous name, Waitukubuli (“Tall is her body”). I have walked along its mountainous spine, home to nine volcanoes and 365 rivers, whose rugged terrain helped shield the island for centuries from the extractive exploitation suffered by neighboring territories.

Today, Dominica faces an enforced transformation. The current administration, in power for twenty-two years, is driving major infrastructure projects: an international airport, a marina inside a national park, a cable car to Boiling Lake that threatens the UNESCO World Heritage status of Morne Trois Pitons National Park, a luxury resort on a beach with delicate volcanic formations, and expanding Chinese economic influence. In the face of this upheaval, will nature reclaim its ground? The devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria in 2017 remains an open wound.

My relationship with Dominica is visceral, physical, and organic. The island becomes a body: the earth turns to flesh, the water to blood. My body moves in rhythm with the land; my senses sharpen. The intensity of this vitality is inseparable from the presence of death and the pull of eternity. I am searching for an elemental connection to an ancestral source – the womb of the earth.

Photography serves as a point of contact: a charged encounter between my body and the island, as well as an entry point into communion with those who call it home. Through “Tall is her body”, incorporating documentary studies, landscapes, and staged tableaux developed in collaboration with artist and performer Nicole Morson, I seek to leave a fragile imprint against the vastness of deep time.

The photobook “Tall is her body” will be published in March 2027 by Éditions AIVAZIAN, followed by an exhibition curated by Aaron Hamilton, Marica Honychurch, and Michael Lees, which will open at the Fort Young Art Gallery in Roseau, Dominica, in June 2027, together with a presentation at Secret Bay Bwa Denn Art Gallery in Portsmouth, Dominica, from October 2027 to January 2028.

Margarita Ivanova is part of Issue 19 by Guest Editor Zanele Muholi.