Fiona Segadães da Silva
Aimez-vous l’Orage?
27 May - 2 June 2023

The thunderstorm suggests both the uproar it engenders and the silence that accompanies it.

What if the exile despondent feeling is passed down from one generation to another?

What if the remote landscapes known by my family members are still living with me?

This project is a fragmentary silent narrative that explores the concepts of exile, corporeality and saudade. I try to interrogate the memory troubles and the void in a palpable approach, to discover how vulnerability can become visible.

The photographs that compose this haunted story come from the tension of my own body inspace as well as from mental projections in bodies other than mine. In suspense, the body collides with a closed environment, projects itself into a space where everything seems fixed and waits for an unexpected upheaval. In exile, engulfed in expectation. Motionless, suspended, until the thunder is heard, the sky will not brighten. It is certain that our bodies are always connected with the places we go through.

I am a very silent and observer person. Also in my photography practice I tend to deplo the silent part of the images. My images are built on feelings of vulnerability, loss and emptiness. They tend to make visible the moments and sensations that are difficult to tell but that inhabit our bodies and our spaces in silence. In this project I also need to analyse the relationship I had with the saudade.*

Everything was guided by essais written by my great-grand-father about his exile and his own relationship to landscapes and melancholy. In a way I’m als trying to reconnect with my family’s cultural heritage. I am attached to organic landscapes, fragments of lives and decontextualized places that allow me to display mysterious temporalspaces and enigmatic stories. Often emotion takes precedence over reality.

*Saudade is a word for a sad state of intense longing for someone or something that is absent. Saudade comesfrom Portuguese culture, and it is often expressed in its literature and music. Saudade is described as a kindof melancholy yearning.
Fiona Segadães Da Silva (b.1995) is a photographer and image book publisher.

She currently lives and works in Le Havre (France). Lover of photography books, printed media and glows; she is a member of the (feu) collective and curator of the editorial project cahier deslucioles. Working on both analog and digital photography in a conceptual approach, her work is built by a sensitive and tangible approach to the images. Her research is particularly interested in our ways of haunting bodies and spaces, our relationships with the living and mental health.

Recently graduated from a M.F.A (June 2022), her artistic career is punctuated by experiences with different audiences through artistic workshops. She is now involved as an independent publisher and her photographic work is featuring in a few upcoming international and collective publications. (Broad Magazine, Another Earth Press, Surface Editions, Neptune Journal).