Nouturnio

“Nouturnio” is an old Galician word that refers to the night.

“Nouturnio” is an old Galician word that refers to the night. It is a variant of nocturno, which arises from the vocalization of the consonant C in U, nouturno, a term of which the variant nouturnio appears and which has been used by authors such as Álvaro Cunqueiro (in his works Amabres lúas nouturnias in Cantiga Nova, or Nouturnio amante en rocas sin aramios in Poemas do si e non), Curros Enríquez (in his poem Nouturnio) and Otero Pedrayo (in his work Nouturnias Sirtes) to refer to the night.

Starting from a theoretical dissertation that proposes a distinction of the night as something more than a natural cycle, and considering it as a configuration of space and time full of subjectivity, the photographic project Nouturnio presents a visual exploration of a dark and subjective nature manifested at dusk through forms that play with the abstraction and unrealization of the natural space. The project presents the concept of reminiscence as a fundamental aspect from which the nocturnal forms originate. Aristotle in his Treatise on the Soul speaks of memory as a faculty of the soul that preserves all that the being has known through the senses, and in this memory there would be a second operation in which the spirit, from a reflection, extracts from the thought a reproduction of the gaze of what has been known. In this way, at night, nature will unmask forms that take on meaning through the reminiscence itself that penetrates the viewer and proposes to him to reach to the memory of the figures that make up the night subjectively.