Hiraeth

Riccardo Bandiera

Imperia, 1973

Hiraeth

The project borrows its title from a magic word in Gaelic that doesn’t have one correspondence in the vocabulary of other existing languages. It’s a term that refers to a feeling, to nostalgia for something, for someone, for a place, for an era, even for an ideal. It’s called Hiraeth and describes the melancholy for a past time, a mixed feeling for someone we met on our path, which we have loved, which we miss and which we wish to find again. It is a lost place to which one cannot return except with the thought, a journey that can only be undertaken accompanied by memories. A regret echoes in the word Hiraeth, a reminder of happy times long gone which generates an unbearable pain for the past that does not return, an ideal world in which one has never lived and one aspires to day after day. The same world where you can float between the sea waters together with the sirens that there brings back to the primordial essence of the aquatic element in a symbiosis between the human, freed from the constraints of the earthly world and the whole of Nature that is regenerative force. Water is life, but at the same time its opposite, a hiraeth between birth and death. An infinite sea in which to receive comfort as from an ever-present companion to which every memory of your life is linked. A sea that knows how to envelop you lovingly between silent depths and boundless landscapes, while slowly dissolving all yours unconscious weight leaving room only for the melancholy memory for someone who does not will walk more by your side. Among the endless waters, only the Sirens remain with you, pagan symbols of fertility and protectors of creation, to show you the paved path of suffered nostalgia, end of which to find that someone so dear to you because the light gave you, suspended in the middle of the cyclical tide of finding oneself and getting lost.