According to the dictionary, nostalgia is a kind of melancholy caused by the memory of a loss, something we experience when we look at a photo album, a hidden box at the bottom of a closet or when we see someone we had lost track of. Well, today, both the elements that produce nostalgia and the time that passes between the act itself and the moment when this becomes longing seem to have been inconceivably reduced. It is no longer the photos of the First Communion, but of last summer that make us experience that state of melancholy that seems to flood our minds faster and faster. But there is something more revealing: our daily routine also gives us a state of longing unsuspected before, that is, without going back too far in time, the panorama of technology has changed in an overwhelming way in less than a decade to the day. A memory exercise would be needed to realize that back in 2005, when smartphones existed only in our imagination, we used chats to communicate. Platforms like Messenger began to introduce us to this very public and yet so introspective a world which nowadays is almost impossible to exit.
These feelings form the main idea on which various artists base their work. Some of them, like the young Canadian Michael Swaney, keep working in order to show us the fine line between the current and the old-fashioned and how trends increasingly precipitate through the enormous informational cascade of which we are victims. He renames this period as the posinternet society, that society in which a huge number of anglicisms have disrupted our usual landscape. You Tube, WhatsApp, Google, Facebook, Dropbox have replaced almost instantaneously others such as MySpace or Hotmail. Swaney’s art closely resembles an anthropological study, showing the way in which we select the information which is going to shape our personal view of the world. Information which is, of course, totally messy and subjective and which we must dissect and digest, and although it may seem a simple task, it is getting less and less simple. That is because some time ago we could read the news in a handful of newspapers and magazines that we held in our hands; now we need only 160 characters to feel perfectly informed of any matter.
With all this, one of the most blamed obsessions of humans is to record the passage of time. We agree that one of the most popular ways of doing that is photography. However, it is the small objects which remain hidden for years until they suddenly and unexpectedly emerge that take us back to an earlier time. Metro tickets that once served as makeshift bookmarks, movie tickets lost in the pockets of a coat or foreign currency left over from a trip will in some way relate our experiences, those moments that we remember vaguely and that with the help of these objects will not be permanently forgotten.
In short, something like nostalgia is what has come over me when, as a result of an exercise of drifting through the net, I have come across some of the first issues of Flic and I rediscovered La Escocesa, Jorge Rodriguez Gerada, a Neil Panter…
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