"Saudade is a Portuguese and Galician word that has no direct translation in English. It describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic or deeply melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves.
Saudade was once described as "the love that remains" after someone is gone. Saudade is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the senses and makes one live again. It can be described as an emptiness, like someone or something that should be there in a particular moment is missing, and the individual feels this absence. It brings sad and happy feelings all together, sadness for missing and happiness for having experienced the feeling."
...and that feeling/word is what inspired my work.
Along with this definition I'm making a video and I intend to do an installation.
I'm trying to show how it feels to be a foreigner, being far from home, the little things that make me miss my everyday life back in Brazil.
I'm trying to play with the 2D and 3D world, the 2D being the memories and the 3D the real life.
Some pictures of what I've been doing.
How do you get that feeling to be resonant in your viewer? Will we make the same connections to the imagery you're creating, since we lack the nostalgia and memory you bring to it? The concern is that your saudade is only for yourself.
ReplyDeleteThere is a concept of protonostalgia- when people are nostalgic for times and places they could not experience. think of a twenty something who is really into pirates, or kids born in the 90's feeling like they missed the 80's. It's a powerful and true force that many people conjure up, and it is based on a cross cultural archetype of what the past time was really like. They see literature, movies, TV, and they fetishize a time and place as a generalization.
I would have you look at Cindy Sherman's work, where she places herself in film stills. The photographs force us to build a narrative about what her character is doing and what will happen. While her work is largely about feminism and yours is about missed place and culture, I think you can use similar mechanisms.
thank you for explaining the meaning of saudade. it reminds me of things in my own work. and i have been looking for a way to express what you wrote here. there is a concept called 'Ma' in japanese that reminds me of this. Ma is something only the person who experiences the feeling can understand for themselves. it is an in between space of emotional nature. it reminds me of that awareness one gets when there is the feeling of time passing. like when the light is perfect and you realize that its so beautiful but it goes away so fast.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_(negative_space)
also going along with what Zach said above, there is an idea that a person can share the memories of their family even without being there, like a genetic passing down of memory. there are many artists that work with memory and place. i hope this makes sense :)