Facing the Sea is a personal and social artistic project photographed and filmed entirely in the course of 2025 – the fruit of a collaboration between the non-profit organization “HaGal Sheli” (My Wave) and the artist and photographer Daniel Tchetchik. The organization operates as a unique social-educational framework that transforms the experience of surfing at sea into a sphere of community building, rehabilitation and empowerment. For at-risk youth, individuals coping with trauma, and special-needs populations, surfing is a tool for self-discovery and a means for coping, fostering emotional resilience, connecting to inner resources and creating a sense of self-competency.
The focal point of this project are participants in the therapeutic program “Tools from the Waves” – children, adolescents, women and men who suffered through the events of October 7, 2023, and the ensuing war. They include evacuees from the “Gaza envelope,” soldiers, families who lost loved ones, families of hostages and survivors of the Nova and Midburn festivals. Each of those photographed carries a personal story of trauma and resilience.
For over a decade, Tchetchik has been engaging with the sea and the surrounding landscapes as a lens through which to examine the fragility, complexity and power of human existence. In this project, he studies the reciprocal relations between the emotional climate and the external environment, combining intimate portraits with landscape photography.
Tchetchik’s works, together with the video interviews filmed and edited by Oren Izre’el, document the participants on a journey of rehabilitation and renewal: the infinity extending on the horizon line, moments in which one’s breath is arrested, an encounter with the waves that calls for movement and presence. The very choice to enter the sea, to face it and to be moved by its power, restores a sense of control, connection and safety. The body’s presence facilitates contact with the wound and the possibility of renewal, as trauma and loss encounter light and hope.
