Fiona SEGADÃES DA SILVA - Aimez-vous l’orage ?
The thunderstorm suggests both the uproar it engenders and the silence that accompanies it. What if the exile despondent feeling is passed down from one generation to another? What if the remote landscapes known by my family members are still living with me? This project is a fragmentary silent narrative that explores the concepts of exile, corporeality and saudade. I try to interrogate the memory troubles and the void in a palpable approach, to discover how vulnerability can become visible.
The photographs that compose this haunted story come from the tension of my own body in space as well as from mental projections in bodies other than mine, I wanted to feel the impotence in a bodily way after having felt it psychologically. The stories of Herminio and Eliyas; their exiles, in two different epochs and spaces, were related by the stories they told to me. In suspense, the body collides with a closed environment, projects itself into a space where everything seems fixed and waits for an unexpected upheaval. In exile, engulfed in expectation. Motionless, suspended, until the thunder is heard, the sky will not brighten. It is certain that our bodies are always connected with the places we go through.
In this project I analyse the relationship I had with saudade.* I'm trying to reconnect with my family’s cultural heritage. This project was guided by notes written by my great-grandfather about his exile and his own relationship to landscapes and melancholy.
*Saudade is a word for a sad state of intense longing for someone or something that is absent. Saudade comes from Portuguese culture, and it is often expressed in its literature and music. Saudade is described as a kind of melancholy yearning.