Mother Volga
Zacchai S.
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A couple years ago I stumbled across a book by John Koenig called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, filled with words created to describe previously unnamed feelings. “Agnothesia” and “austice" jumped out at me, but most of all, "sonder" caught my eye. It describes the realization that everyone around you has a life as intricate and detailed as your own, filled with their own hardships and joys and day-to-day (activities). In my art, specifically the street portraits that I take (but also any of my other portraits), I try to capture the feeling of sonder: of not looking at a portrait, but at a person. The act of going up to strangers and having a conversation with them reveals and re-sparks sonder in my heart every time.
My art strives to achieve the translation of emotion. I consider it a success if my art can inspire in the viewer an emotion that can not be summed up by a single, already existing word.
Whether I explore more focused topics such as isolation and loneliness or sexuality and self-expression—all at the forefront of my mind given the effects of the pandemic and the beginning of senior year—sonder still plays a role in showing the universality of the human endeavor, (and the emotions at the core of that). I would like to prove that as a whole, we as human beings all have much more in common than we might first give credit.
I hope that my art can bring the world closer to a world in which everyone understands and experiences sonder; a more beautiful, accepting, and anti-biased world, because at its core, sonder is pure, undiluted empathy.
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Creativity to me means unbiased expression. Specifically, it is the translation of emotion, so that it can be re-experienced by others. Unbiased expression is not limited by preconceived notions of the forms that art should take, and thus is the most personal type of emotional expression.
