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A statement
informing the project "In search of Albion, expectation located in the
foreign and nostalgia".
On
questions of travel, dislocation and nostalgia.
‘It
seems to me that I would always be better of where I am not, and this
question of moving is one of those I discuss incessantly with my soul.’
Charles Baudelaire.
As a
society we are captivated by new destinations, both spiritual and worldly,
immersed in a search for the holy grail of an ‘intellectual truth’ that we
cannot locate in our present temporal and spatial home. In a world
incessantly “becoming” something else, we labour to construct better futures
by examining historical events, but both the future we desire and the past
we examine have taken on the quality of permanence both temporally and
spatially, they are places where we imagine we ceased ‘becoming’. This sense
of permanence, given especially to nostalgic memories we transfer to our
ambitions for the future, we avidly want to ‘arrive’, we want to cease
‘becoming’ and ‘become’ content in our own narrative.
In
here book ‘Questions of Travel’; Caren Kaplan describes tourism as heralding
the post-modern. ‘it is a product of the rise of consumer culture, leisure
and technological innovation,’ she also examines the origins of what is
nostalgia in Western Culture, born in forced exile from homeland, family and
language. As a Scot I am aware of many historical instances of forced exile,
one such event being the Highland Clearances, many other Scots chose exile
through circumstance, chiefly poverty, providing European armies throughout
the 17th and 18th centuries with countless
mercenaries. This sense of displacement interpreted and celebrated in the
traditional songs and poetry of Scotland is today usurped and we attach
these nouveau feelings of loss to the inescapable temporal
dislocation of a lived life.
“Nostalgia is often found under imperialism, where people mourn the passing
of something they themselves have transformed” and is “a process of
yearning, for what one has destroyed that is a form of mystification.” Renato Rosald
In
nostalgia we are constantly seeking what we ourselves destroy. |