Ab aqua

It's a project about the loss of a loved one, which many times happens suddenly and unexpectedly.

I started my project after the end of my last romantic relationship, a long-distance relationship that didn’t end in the best way. Once I decided on the main theme which the whole project revolves around, I thought that the best way to represent it was to take inspiration from a mythical love story with a tragic ending, like the one I chose.

So after a period of research I found the myth of Ero and Leandro, a love story without a happy ending.It tells the story of two young lovers separated by the Hellespont who see their story end tragically with his drowning. It was first written in the form of a poem by Museo Grammatico in the fifth century A.D. and later adapted in Ovidio’s Eroidi which narrates the myth through an exchange of letters between the two lovers.

Although my relationship didn’t end with the physical death of the other person, not being able to see her, talk to her or have any kind of contact made me experience this end as a real mourning.

In addition to the myth, I have read two books about how people experience certain types of feelings and emotions, such as shock, fear, anxiety and others. In “On Life After Death”, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross compares the end of a relationship with a mourning because both of these scenarios provoke common feelings in the individuals that experience them.

She also processes the 5 phases of the grief cycle. She begins by saying that these phases are interchangeable and they can resurface through time with different intensity and without a precise order: emotions don’t have rules.