Rooted and free
Celine & Rodrigo van Heel
Some people travel. Others are never entirely still.
Celine and Rodrigo van Heel belong to the second category. For FLOYD, they are more than subjects of a story about movement. They are what happens when mobility stops being a phase and becomes identity — when a suitcase is no longer an object, but the only constant in a life built on change.
The van Heels come from everywhere — which is another way of saying: nowhere in particular. Their father is Dutch, their mother Spanish, roots running back through Indonesia and Mexico. They were born in two different countries and grew up in several more. Every few years: a new place, a new rhythm, a new version of home.
Ask Celine where she is from, and there is no fixed answer.
"So where am I from? I don't know. I just know that every time I go to the airport with my little suitcase, I'm smiling. Oh — I get to go somewhere again."
Rodrigo has been in La Coruña for a bit now — the town where their grand parents are from. He spent four years training in Michelin kitchens, an experience he sums up without irony as ‚the best apprenticeship of his life and also the worst time of his life.‘ He burned out, walked away, and let music catch him. Now he runs the kitchen at a small wine bar, cooks with the produce of his own garden, guides fly-fishing trips on the river in summer and records music the rest of the time.
"I'm allowed to be me in a small wine bar. I'm turning my passions into work. That's the goal, no? To enjoy the work."
Celine was a fashion journalist in Paris before the pandemic moved her to Galicia to live with their grandfather. She started photographing and posting him and the project went off like a flare. Now she shoots fashion, directs, made an entire album, did Eurovision. It's a long list and she's still adding to it.
"I don't want to be just a photographer. If I only did music, I think I'd kill myself. I need to create in different ways. I don't know what I'm looking for — I'm just going with it. I hope I'm always going to create and be an artist until I die."
They've shot several campaigns for FLOYD together — Senegal, the American Southwest, their own coastline. No crew, no assistants. Every shot with both of them in it was taken by someone who had no idea they'd be doing that five minutes earlier.
"We ask random people. Celine sets everything up perfectly, then finds someone on the street. In Senegal we had one old man holding the camera, another one holding the light — a guy holding a flash for the first time in his life. And it worked out. It's the most fun thing."
Nothing gets planned. They'd tell you that's the point.
"We just book the flights. The magic happens when you don't plan — when you let yourselves arrive. Sometimes it's slower. But it gives so much more to the picture."
It's also more or less how Rodrigo first learned what freedom felt like. Before the two of them ever traveled together, there was a trip he took alone, in his early twenties, that moved something into place.
"The first time I was really on my own was Bali. I worked to get there, worked in a restaurant once I arrived. And it hit me — oh, I'm on my own. I'd always been independent, fishing alone, doing things alone. But you always go home to your family after. In Bali, it was just me."
Then three months across the United States in a beat-up Toyota, sleeping wherever the day ran out.
"Three months of being free. No rules, nothing. I feel most free on a road I don't know, just driving for hours. Not every country is built for it. The US is. Argentina. Maybe Norway…"
Celine wasn't on that trip. She heard about it for years. Eventually they went back together — and made it a FLOYD shoot.
We gave each of them the same test, separately: look around the room you're in, you're leaving in sixty seconds, you can take three things. Go.
Rodrigo barely had to think.
"My guitar. A bottle of red wine from France. And tomato seeds — the same ones I've grown for five years. They're tiny, they fit in a pocket. Because maybe one day I end up somewhere with nothing, and I can start again from a seed."
Celine's answer was three words.
"Passport. Phone. Cigarettes."
A guitar, a handfull of seeds, a bottle of wine. A passport, a phone, a pack of cigarettes. One of them is packing to be dropped in the middle of nowhere and survive. The other is packing to make a flight. Same question, same blood, not one object in common.
Yet they're after the same thing. Rodrigo is the one who said it out loud.
"Even here, where I have everything, I still feel like I need to move. I need to get out. Every year it's the same: man, I'm happy, but I have to go. And then I'm away, and there's nothing like having a home. To know I have a home is great. But I need to get out sometimes. It's like being in between — rooted to a place, and free, at the same time. Trying to find the balance."
Celine heard that and didn't disagree. She just hasn't found the place yet that makes her want to stop.
"I'd love to be like you. Chill! — This is starting to feel like therapy guys."
Given the floor at the end — anything they wanted to add — Rodrigo didn't talk about the shoots, or the pictures, or the work. Celine smiled. He talked about what the travelling had actually handed the two of them.
"What this gave us was time, time together, my sister and me. In a life, to get to spend that much time with the person you grew up next to — that's the thing. That's the real gift."
Celine & Rodrigo Selection
Vegas Green
Galaxy Night
Bronco Brown
Bronco Brown