Fiona SEGADÃES DA SILVA - Aimez-vous l’orage ?
The thunderstorm suggests both the uproar it engenders and the silence that accompanies it. The project questions whether the exile’s despondent feeling is passed down from one generation to another and whether the remote landscapes known by the artist’s family members continue to live within him. This work is a fragmentary silent narrative that explores the concepts of exile, corporeality, and saudade. It seeks to interrogate memory troubles and the void through a palpable approach, discovering how vulnerability can become visible.
The photographs composing this haunted story arise from the tension of the artist’s own body in space as well as from mental projections onto bodies other than his own. He aimed to feel impotence in a bodily way after having experienced it psychologically. The stories of Herminio and Eliyas - their exiles in two different epochs and spaces - are connected through the narratives they shared. Suspended, the body collides with a closed environment, projecting itself into a space where everything seems fixed and awaits an unexpected upheaval. In exile, engulfed in expectation, motionless and suspended, until the thunder is heard and the sky brightens. It is certain that bodies are always connected with the places they pass through.
In this project, the artist analyses the relationship he had with saudade, attempting to reconnect with his family’s cultural heritage. The project is guided by notes written by his 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 is often expressed in its literature and music. It is described as a kind of melancholy yearning.