Anthony "Rojo" Vaccario Sr. and his two sons share a rustic woodworking shop in the middle of a family-owned residential property on the outskirts of Maskall Village in northern Belize. Their process is fully hands-on. They hunt and harvest their own raw resources and use whatever means available to transport it "back-o-bush" to their property. Documenting their process was an honor as we really got to witness the dance between a carver's vision and the wood's natural form. I remember Rojo pulling me aside to explain that he couldn't carve just anything, the wood needed to reveal what it wanted to be. I thought that was such a fascinating insight. The idea that we cannot impose our will when working with the natural world. That we must surrender control and flow with the direction that only reveals itself through the process. How liberating to accept the quality of this limitation.


This was the first commercial we shot for Belikin and the wisdom Rojo shared put me into a Bruce-Lee like mindset for the rest of the campaign: “Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”