Seeing Solastalgia
What is Solastalgia?
“Solastalgia’ describes the specific form of melancholia connected to lack of solace and intense desolation”. G.Albrecht
The word “solace” is derived from solari and solacium, with meanings connected to the alleviation of distress or to the provision of comfort in the face of distressing events (such as environmental changes, urban changes).
As it is described in the article from 2007 [Albrecht et al. “Solastalgia: The distress caused by environmental change”]:
“Solastalgia is not about looking back to some golden past, nor is it about seeking another place as ‘home’. It is the ‘lived experience’ of the loss of the present as manifest in a feeling of dislocation”.
Many events can cause solastalgia. Drought, fire and flood can cause solastalgia, as can war, terrorism, land over usage, over-tourism.
Unexpressed emotions, such as feelings towards new ways of seeing our environment are now appearing in the global map of feelings.
Unexpressed societal emotions can lead to dangerous ignorance of important contributions.
Noticing solastalgia
Evidence of noticing individual or collective solastalgia are difficult to record, since often confounding effects may intervene, as our mental space is rarely empty, we use social media. Loss of place (destruction during the war, environmental changes) leads to loss of sense of place experienced as the condition of solastalgia.
Trees are often considered as attributes of space, yet we do not consider how this may affect our relations with space itself.
Hence loss of trees can often be projected into a sense of loss of space, as much as it is primarily loss of living species on Earth. Many researchers previously talked about loss of sense of connectedness with other living beings, and loss of connectedness with the Earth itself:
“There is a social correlate of Mitchell’s identification of the loss of the unity of humans and the earth with psychic instability in Emile Durkheim’s concept of anomie”.
Both the loss of country and the disintegration of cultural ties between
humans and the land (their roots) are implicated in all aspects of the ‘crisis’ within many communities.
Solastalgia, time and space
The notion of solastalgia, as a new unnamed emotion comes closely together with other notions such as nostalgia. Yet solastalgia is not related to exclusively time-concept, as it is related to time-space entangled relation.
You stand in front of a sea, yet you do not see the sea, which you used to see. You see environment which has changed, a road near the sea, which disappeared. You are there, yet you do not manage to connect to the place, because not just you changed, but the place itself.
“As the Aral Sea has dried up, fisheries and the communities that depended on them collapsed. The increasingly salty water became polluted with fertilizer and pesticides. The blowing dust from the exposed lakebed, contaminated with agricultural chemicals, became a public health hazard.”
Aral sea memories
Ancient emotions
Working with Aboriginal people in Australia, one of the longest documented continuous cultures on the planet, records about expressions of “ancient” emotions, originated in times where “terra” was the main source of fears, subject of worshiping. So-called terraphthoric and terrancient proto-emotions give birth to emotions we may have now and not always knowing where they come from.
Another direction to explore solastalgia is to look at other related feelings. Such as topophilia (from Greek word “topos”), feeling of attachment to a specific space is yet another strong feeling connected with the space. In the city the notion of space itself is different. Space in the city is bounded, due to the limitations of space for construction around space in the city often belongs to some abstract, non-physcial organisations, hence we are getting further away from space. We see it, but it is not what initially was there before, which often may be the cause of solastalgia.
Cities and unexpressed emotions
Visualising collective emotions of people has been for long time what art has been helping with. You arrive and your emotions are collectively directed into one or another way. Previously similar things were happening with cities, people were going to messes, priests were directing emotions.
In recent cities (if not taking Kathmandu into account) often emotions of missing nature are often non expressed. Where such places of gathering and directing of collective emotions in cities could be expressed
and who could play a role of director? Activists, monks, or city gardeners?
Exhibition inspired by Solastalgia
After seminal works by Glenn Albrecht about solastalgia, the term started to be used by scientific and art communities, appearing in various exhibitions and spaces.
Recently the exhibition was organised with the help of the STARTS.eu, the exhibition on forgotten and sometimes hidden relations between citizens and trees in cities, which aim to bring back relation of humans to space and lost.
City trees are not always able to survive in city environments. Yet subconsciously people living in cities are choosing places next to them.
In this project (with Vlad Afanasiev, Yasamin Nemotohani, Olga Kisseleva and collaborators in Sony labs from Rome) were discovering the relations between citizens paths and trees positions, characterising their paths by green indices. Quantitative characterisation is not enough to understand it, more stories on importance of trees are needed. Inspired by the concept of solastalgia we try to describe particular sides of it, such as solastalgia in respect to trees. While nostalgia is related to the feeling of more missing or being home-sick. It is the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault (physical desolation)
More about the exhibition and our work https://starts.eu/what-we-do/regional-centers/repairing-the-present-exhibitions/
More about the conference where data analysis part is presented is posted here https://www.cityvis.io/workshops/2022/
Trees in many cities are cut out living no traces behind, except digital photos, documented by desperate citizens. One of such project was organised by one citizen of Rome, who is the core of “Alberi di Roma” community. A person who aims to document all trees in Rome.
The documentation of tree-loss in one of the biggest and historically-rich cities of Europe was the key project for active people’s minds and not just discussing through non-sustainability of actions, yet also feeling through these actions.
