Irene

Ancient Greeks believed that melancholy was a physiological illness​ that even affected heroes like Hercules, to the point of being​ referred to as a sacred disease by Aristotle.

Precisely because the melancholic personality is haunted by death,​ it is the melancholics who best know how to read the world. (S.​ Sontag)

The contemporary view of melancholy has gradually moved away​ from its medical, religious or even astral component, towards a​ more egocentric or even hereditary aspect and a fundamental part​ of the individual's consciousness and personality.

If, as Calvino states, “melancholy is sadness that has become light”, I​ can clarify that this photo essay is nothing more than a compliment​ to lightness, and to the role that memory has in the construction of a​ present nostalgia.

Invisible cities by the same author are for many one of the most​ beautiful accounts of lost civilizations and fictional architecture. For​ me, it is paradigmatic in the temporal issue because it is a present-​ time report about something past, and about how the role of​ memory almost always has an episodic and autobiographical​ appearance.

Within the various themes, grouped by chapters, there is one that​ makes an analogy between cities and the sense of place and​ identity. Irene is one of those cities, one “is the city where you arrive​ for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to​ return”. Taking identity as a mutating part of an individual, memory is​ what is left behind, and therefore I think there is no better concept​ than that of this fictional city to express the duality between a ​ present nostalgia and a past nostalgia.

Irene was also the name of my grandmother.

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CALVINO, Italo, Le città invisibili, 1972
CALVINO, Italo, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 1988
SEIXAS LOPES, Diogo, Melancholy and Architecture – On Aldo Rossi, 2016
SONTAG, Susan, Under the Sign of Saturn, 1980