Hiraeth
RICCARDO BANDIERA

The project borrows its title from a magic word in Gaelic that has no correspondence in the vocabulary of other existing languages. It is a term that refers to a feeling, nostalgia for something, someone, a place, an era, even an ideal.

It is called Hiraeth and describes the melancholy for a time gone by, a thwarted feeling for someone we have met on our path, someone we have loved, someone we miss and long to find again. It is a lost place to which one cannot return except with thought, a journey that can only be taken accompanied by memories. A regret echoes in the word Hiraeth, a remembrance of happy times long gone that generates an irrepressible sorrow for the past that does not return, an ideal world in which one has never lived to which one aspires day after day. The same world dve can float among the sea waters together with the mermaids that takes us back to the primordial essence of the water 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 whom every memory of your life is bound.

A sea that knows how to envelop you lovingly amid silent depths and boundless landscapes, as it slowly dissolves all your unconscious burdens, leaving room only for melancholy remembrance for someone who will no longer walk by your side. Among the boundless waters, only the Sirens, pagan symbols of fertility and protectors of creation, remain with you, to show you the path paved with suffering nostalgia, at the end of which to find that someone so dear to you because the light has given you, suspended in the midst of the cyclic tide of finding and losing yourself.

Riccardo Bandiera