saudade

Saudade. How to explain? Saudade is love, saudade is desire, saudade is nostalgia, it’s who you have left behind, who left you, it is what we lived and what we haven’t lived. Saudade is now. The pandemic came to leave everyone simultaneously feeling it. Saudade for that bar, the beach, of that hug, that kiss. This feeling that many can say only Brazilians know and understand. Saudade is what I tried to begin to explain in my final major foundation project, as soon as I moved out of my country for the first time, alone. When I really understood what saudade really was. A project that became my life. It became my mission to define the indefinable. Some will understand, some won’t, but the saudade. Will stay.

“Saudade” is a word that only exists in the Portuguese language and one of the hardest to translate. Saudade can be seen as a state of mind with a constant feeling of emptiness, absence, and a “memory of something with a desire for it” as Duarte Nunes Leão, a Portuguese historian would define it. Being born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, moving to London in 2018 and experiencing a completely new reality, Helena has felt saudade every single day ever since.

In the form of a magazine, Helena incorporated aspects of her culture and personal life to convey the idea of the intimacy of saudade, also by using only the people she loves and trusts as models and their safe space as locations. With a strong interest in analog photography, she aimed to use it as a tool, as it reflects the aspect of the theme, relating film as an organic and old, but renovating form of photography to the different forms of interpretation of memory and nostalgia.