Galdino’s Sukhasana

Among the athletes at that competition, Fernanda Galdino was the one who made my eyes vibrate the most. At fifteen, there was a boldness in her tricks that seemed inseparable from a confidence she had already built. At forty-five, I would not step onto a wooden board with wheels and launch myself six, eight, or ten meters into the air, with no brakes beyond what mastery of the movement itself could provide. Fernanda made something that, to me, contained an almost incomprehensible degree of risk look simple.

Through social media, I noticed how closely her parents were involved in her career. I saw their presence as an important part of her journey, and I told them directly what the photograph had made me feel: I was certain Fernanda would still reach extraordinary heights in the world of sports.

Perhaps that is why the title emerged from an association so far removed from the skatepark. Sukhasana, the meditative seated posture of Indian yoga, places the legs in a crossed position and turns attention inward. Fernanda appears in a similar configuration, but displaced to the opposite extreme of experience: there is no ground, no rest, no stillness. There is concrete below, speed all around, and gravity as a permanent condition.

And yet, something of the posture remains. Her crossed legs momentarily suspend the violence we imagine in the movement. Her concentration seems to create a kind of silence within the flight.

That displacement is what interests me in the image. A posture associated with meditation encounters skateboarding; inwardness encounters height; stillness encounters movement. Fernanda seems to pass through all of these states at once, as if she had discovered, in midair, her own particular way of remaining balanced.