Erasmus

Solastalgia

Solastalgia is a word that describes a feeling of nostalgia of a place that you considered as home, but you no longer feel it as such. This term was named by Australian philosopher Glenn Albretch and it is a converging between the Latin words “Solacium” or consolation and “Algia” or pain.

I decided work on this term because of my researching of climate change, being this feeling one of the consequences of this global warming. I knew this word thanks to some posts of the photographer Pete K. Muller, who do I follow in Instagram.

Moreover, I decided to make people collaborate in this video by telling which place on Earth was their refugee. Finally, 23 persons around Europe (Spain, Turkey, Italy, France and Germany) participated sharing with me their places, but without knowing the final purpose of my short film: make also them reflect about what would it happen or how would they feel if these beloved placed disappeared.

About the aspect and style of the video it is no aleatory. It is divided in three parts:

The first part deals with the oneiric sense of our beloved places and it is composed by relaxing images of nature and a calm voice that speaks with poetry.

The second part is the one who belongs to the 23 persons that collaborated with me, letting them talk about their special places and being accompanied by images of these specific places (if they could find them and send them to me) or images that could match with these places and I have already had (because of quarantine no one was able to go and record his/her place).

The third one is referred to the dystopia of a world where these places disappeared. I use the aspect ratio of square and grain of the image to represent a look to the past when these places existed, but they do not live no longer. It represents a memory, an old recording, like an analog camera that you have of your family and contains pictures of a past that you are not going to meet.

Also, I concluded that I did not want to use music at all, just voices and sound of nature to make it more real, more as a memory we have. According to the language, I decided to let everyone speak in their own tongues to make them feel more comfortable in the speech and because I thought it would be more beautiful like that. I subtitled all the video in English.

Finally, I posted this video in my artistic Instagram account to share it with the persons who collaborated and with some more who could find it interesting.