O que sentimos (What We Feel/Felt)

O que sentimos (What We Feel/Felt) is a series of photographs that use the poetry of Rosalía de Castro to better understand the oft misunderstood Galicia, a complex, and historically maligned region of Spain. Rosalía, as a woman and Galician in the 19th Century, expressed and defied her double marginalization in her work. In my work, I harness her tradition, insight, and methodology to formulate my own understanding of Galicia.

Rosalía de Castro scribed her three major collections of poetry—Cantares gallegos (Galician Songs), Follas novas (New Leaves), and En las orillas del Sar (On the Banks of the River Sar)—in the mid 1800s during a time when women were mostly discouraged from intellectual pursuits and the Galician language was looked down upon from the greater Spanish state. In spite and because of this, she expressed intimate emotions, ideas, and experiences, both unique to herself and universal to the Galician people, and ultimately was credited with ushering in a renaissance of Galician literature and political consciousness.

Whereas Rosalía writes to celebrate her home, language, and identity, I come there as an outsider. I was called to Galicia, its mystery and distinct language, and spent a year embedding myself in the place with Rosalía as my guide. To make the photographs, I draw from her proto-feminist conviction that women, too, can make art from their feelings and nature, rather than the stereotypes of women as nature or beholden to their out-of-control emotions. Rosalía reclaims these so-called male domains for herself, and has created a lasting legacy that I continue.

Rather than directly translating the poems into images, my photographs channel Rosalía’s use of the landscape to articulate internal feelings. Her bold, evocative language is transformed into my study of light and shadow; common themes that appear in her work—melancholy, pain, morriña (longing, homesickness), a revindication of her native land—I found in the pobo e terra (people and land). Led to the places that appear in her poems and by the people I met in Galicia, I was able to form my own experiences of the place, which are then captured in my photographs. I relate these photos back to Rosalía’s poetry. My experiences and her poetry form a kind of circuit: the poems influenced my explorations and my explorations influenced how I read and related to her work. Though Galicia will never be my patria chica (small homeland), shaped by Rosalía’s words and my own explorations, my photographs express my morriña for a homeland that isn’t my own.