Heimweh
Where is home? When was home? What is homesickness? Living in a world of growing globalization and mobility the question of home becomes more imminent. Four creatives from Berlin have started an art project on nostalgia and went on a quest to find Heimweh – and learned, how difficult it is to put it into pictures.
A sequence in a minor key, the melancholy sound of waves clashing on the beach, the picture in a yellowed photo album, the smell of food from childhood – all this can trigger an uncertain longing for years gone by, the times and events only existing in memory. A sense of sadness, lost time, loss, longing – Heimweh. We call it nostalgia. But what is it?
We constantly encounter nostalgic clichés; the collector, who makes his objects into his life’s purpose. An imprint of everything long gone. A style of music, kitsch, clubs, sentiment of life. Nostalgia is carried from the idea, of trying to hold on to something, to want to collect. To retrieve a moment or the time, that is gone.
We understand nostalgia as a longing for home: Nostos (Greek word for coming home) and àlgia (Greek word for pain). But what this exactly means – our birth place, where we live, our childhood, an old political system – is and remains an open question – a blank space. It is the missing piece in the picture. A fragment, that can’t be put easily into words and pictures. But everyone understands it. We are homesick for a different location, a different time, a different condition. We long for something that doesn’t come back. Childhood, youth, virginity.
Four nostalgics with different backgrounds – started the quest for images expressing nostalgia – free of clichés expressing an universal phenomenon. Nostalgia is complex, a spectrum of possibilities but also personal, it originates out of personal and cultural experiences and references. How can one make experience what is difficult to grasp? A woman can rejuvenate her looks but she does not gain fulfillment in her nostalgia for youth and fertility. The course of time is unstoppable.
Pictures dialogue with the viewer in delivering a direct and emotional message. But are pictures universal? In our work we quickly discovered borders as everyone perceives images very differently. Two Germans in intercultural relationships, a German-Portuguese and a American – how can we unite our different cultural backgrounds? The image of the Indian showed this very clearly: one sees the Indian as a symbol for home in nature, for others it is the rememberence of genesis and contemporary socio-cultural problems. Images are interpreted very differently through different cultures and personal experience.
Our intercultural dialog is also a process, a quest and a journey where we learn about ourselves and our subjects. The quest for an image is just the beginning. We open drawers and look into them. We explore our own cultural backgrounds. It might not be a coincidence that we do this in Berlin, a city of historical layers, identities, and ghosts. Sometimes East German nostalgic, or Ostalgic, but with laws prohibiting Third Reich nostalgia.