Bittersweet Longing: the impossible return

Most of us sense ‘home’ as place of belonging with mythical, affirming implications. We sense few of us are lucky enough to be unproblematically immersed in it. We know others have mournfully lost it and many of us keep diligently searching for it.

But what if home isn’t a place at all, but a set of structural contradictions that set-in motion forms of productive, sometimes destructive, longing that have a complicated but generative place in creativity?

What if the return ‘home’ does not end in euphoric unity or static attainment but ends in bittersweet longing, with tendencies to poignancy and sorrow; an acute awareness of “this loose, drifting material of life”, with occasional ‘moments of being’ felt as shock in our encounters with the world (Virgina Woolf, A sketch of the Past). I view this longing as driven by an elemental interplay between the responsibilities of remembering and forgetting, darkness and light, beauty and sorrow, mortality and meaning - A bittersweet longing that takes on the momentum of force as we transmute it into meaning, in our acts of creation.

With examples from recent projects with the Sir John Soane’s Museum London; the iconic Teatro Valle in Rome and the estate of Luigi Pirandello; the train keepers of Salento, Italy at the moment their roles became obsolete, and more recent experiences of illness I will explore the creative potential of unbelonging; What the uncanny return of the lost/ forgotten person, artefact, architectures or documents tells us about social and political histories, and the ethics, of remembering; What the double-headed experience of illness can tell us about how we dwell in the body - our ultimate home.

This is due to be the basis of a forthcoming book with Routledge of the same name, where the Keynote will form the opening chapter