Nostalgia

Elena Ghigas (Gigante) / composer, live electronics Sarah Grace Graves / performer, voice Denise Tamburi / performer, alto flute Leonardo Melchionda / performer, prepared electric guitar and marbles Nostalgia reflects on the health of our planet. Together we consider the following realities: - Today, billions of people face some form of water stress. - Experts say that even more areas of the rain forest suffer from degradation, which is when the forest's health diminishes, making full deforestation in those areas more likely in the future. - Global warming is expected to increase the number of water-stressed areas and heighten water stress in already affected regions. - The Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet. - The average temperatures have increased by about 3.5 to 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit (2 to 3 degrees Celsius) since the preindustrial period, compared to roughly 1.8 degrees F (1 degree C) for the planet as a whole. - More than 5,000 square miles of the rain forest (13,000 square kilometers) lost in 2021 – a fifteen-year high – and record-breaking numbers in the first sixth months of 2022. (Source: Council on Foreign Relations, “Energy and Environment: Climate Change”) We realized this project during the days of the festival by way of an open-ended collaborative process based on conversation, improvisation, and exchange between composer and performers. Such dialogue prompted a deep personal and collective exploration of sense memory, which grounds our search for a new yet ancient way of being in a world that is falling apart. The word “nostalgia” is composed of two parts: nostos, meaning “return,” and algos, meaning “pain.” Earth is our home that is becoming further and further away from us. Novalis asks “Where are we really going?”. Perhaps, “Always home.”