The story begins next to a window. There, Edén Bernal's grandmother spent her last three decades, cut off from the world, locked inside herself. There was no other option: such is the fate of many women who find no other route for their lives. When she passed away, there was a lot Edén had not yet understood. There was something inscrutable left in that woman who had chosen an inner exile. 

Then we go to Sonora, to a hot, dry, desert area. Climate change, water misuse and local conditions have desertified what was once a river and a mangrove. Life has vanished. However, a few fishers remain, and among them, some women who, for Eden, communed with certain aspects of her grandmother's life. 

He met Mercedes when she was 79 years old. Now, at 84, she continues fishing for oysters in that site, together with her sister Armida, who is 80. In search of oysters in a distant land, they take refuge from the world, leaving behind what once imprisoned them: the world dominated by men, regulated by their desires and their habits. 

Bernal's project has taken several forms: first a short documentary film about Bertha, a cowgirl who lives on her own in the forest, entitled Destierros. This was followed by Exilios, a photographic book in which the artist compiles his field diaries. Now, El Canto de la Sirena is a feature film in progress that will tell the story of Mercedes and Armida: their self-imposed exile, their difficult conditions and their tenacity are evident in this story. 

Mercedes says that, when she dies, she will become a mermaid so she can stay and live there in the estuaries. The desire to be something else: to merge with nature. Her song will not be a fatal trap, but the vibration of nature with which she is entwined. How to live beyond the limits of the corporeal? How to create a world where those who are excluded from it can fit in?

For Edén Bernal, this project is a way to reconcile with his grandmother, to unite the parts of a story that would otherwise be condemned to fragmentation, dispersion, silence. Through tenacious women who struggle against, or alongside, an unrelenting nature, endangered by human action, the artist tells of lives we would not get to know otherwise. These are lives that have withdrawn at their own will, to reach fulfillment far from the narrow confines of patriarchal society. In the solitude of water, songs of other possible lives resonate, lives that they have brought into the world. 

Achieving this connection requires submitting to contemplation and the passage of time. This project has taken a good part of a decade. It will still continue, while the artist finds the right voice for the songs of his sirens to emerge, a way of constructing the story that allows us to enter into lives that are estranged on purpose, by will. The inner exile these women have opted for opens up the possibility for them to live differently; it is with transparency and honesty that another person can approach them and understand that. Bernal says that it is also a way of reconciling with his own masculinity, that broken ghost that detaches and fragments, that pushes certain lives to the margins.

In this way, we witness in El canto de la Sirena the invocation of a possibility, the manifestation of how a documentary or a photographic project can open the door to new worlds, different from those narrowly imagined and in the distance. Other things are possible. Sharing what is most intimate is possible; not always desirable, but possible. These sirens speak to us of what we have, what we lose and what we gain when we enunciate our life in our terms. It is an exercise in listening to songs from which many others would have fled. It is to let ourselves be carried to another plane, another time. 

The grandmother, back in that other time, also listened. She was silent, but she listened a lot. She knew what she had left behind in her exile. She knew what was possible in this and other lives. The mermaid-women swim towards their destiny, their destiny-other, their future vanished in the sands and currents, where no one can bind them anymore.

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With each issue of the column, Fernando takes us into the world of creative documentary through a piece relating to the volume's theme, opening us to the infinite possibilities of this genre that blurs the boundaries between reality, experience and imagination.