SEHNSUCHT

Sehnsucht, Paloma Herrera

By: Marcel del Castillo

Never before had a generation of young people been attacked by a relentless virus against their moods and emotional and social development. Hyper-production and the constant, unrelenting state of performance have seeped into their bloodstream like a dangerous toxin. This phenomenon, of course, is accompanied by an educational process whose sole purpose in this century is to train highly qualified production agents.

Paloma Herrera has interpreted this phenomenon based on the suffering of her "Sehnsucht" (a German noun translated as "longing" or "craving") or the "could have been" that, at her young age, already add up to quite a few. And that feeling of frustration, of being anchored in the "could have beens," places her, like an entire generation, in a loss of meaning, in an uncertainty that confronts the toxic excess of artificial positivity that our social environment sells and is supported by the ominous expression: "Everything is possible."

It's difficult to understand at some point that not everything is possible, that clinging to the "yes, we can" of everything we dream of opens the door to continuous frustration that will affect our individual and social performance.

But, despite this bleak outlook, Paloma Herrera presents us with a visual project filled with humor and sensitivity, where she navigates through those "could have beens," through those "everything is possible" scenarios, to transform them into spaces of reflection on identity, on who we are and want to be. She approaches the topic in a noble way, laden with meaning and visual dialogues. The mere act of identifying what is happening with her emotions is already, from an individual perspective, a step aside from the cookie-cutter moldings that our social, media, and cultural policies demand.

The Sehnsucht project invites us to rethink our own "could have beens," to reposition them and move them from states of frustration to states of great experiences, of unrealizable dreams but full of sensitivities that nourish us.

As Calderón de la Barca would say:

"What is life? A madness.

What is life? An illusion,

a shadow, a story.

And the greatest good is little enough;

for all life is a dream,

and dreams themselves are only dreams."