The future of nostalgia.

"I realised that nostalgia goes beyond individual psychology. At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time - the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against a modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition." Svetlana Boym in "The Future of Nostalgia".

I've been rereading the beautiful book this quote is taken from recently and thinking more about whether it is a true original almost medical definition of nostalgia that influences my work as much as a sense of memory. Can dealing with memory in relation to place actually be detached from nostalgia when the two are nearly etymologically linked (it literally translates as longing for home). I have always been interested in the crossover between dreams and reality - echoes that act almost as ghosts of our past swimming around us as we go about the everyday - and in the 17th century when the term nostalgia was first coined, sufferers were said to confuse the real and the imaginary, the past with the present and were even more likely to see ghosts, as if nostalgia was what opened up this inner layer of human history and consciousness. Could nostlagia be the key to unlocking the poetic quality of making sense of our memories and the past - these days nostalgia is seen as something quaint and often kitsch (especially in relation to communism - something I am particularly interested in), but perhaps by restoring it to its original status as serious condition we can begin to unravel the layers of history that confuse us - the personal rather than collective memory that is reflective and Romantic as opposed to restorative with a claim to historical authority. I am often interested in souvenirs and personal mementos - esoteric collections and cabinets of curiosity. It is hard to make concrete sense of such objects as they are inherently caught up in a personal reflective life we cannot ever empirically prove, but I think these objects can still hold history - perhaps even create an atmosphere that in itself is relevant for what it hints at - the everyday life which is how we all experience history when it is the present, and is how we remember the grander historical events when we look back through our own memories - how the world was falling to pieces on the TV whilst we held our favourite mug or glanced at a broken toy in the corner of the room. It is the stories behind these things I seek to bring back in my work.