“Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie”
PASCAL, 1963, p. 528


Diante da infinitude do nada


What is fear? How does it come about? Where does it come from?
Fear is made of the ignorance of our own being, we all have to live it and understand it. Fear points to our fragility, vulnerability and finitude.
Heidegger (1889-1976) proposes that men experience fear fighting his deepest instincts, through the courage to launch himself into the abyss of the unknown and the ability to walk towards nothingness, in order to seek its essence.
Today we do not accept anguish as a space for reflection, our illusions of control and our compulsive effort to foresee and secure life often lead to feelings of meaninglessness.
This photo essay proposes to address my fear of outer space. Through the creation of photographs that make me uncomfortable with the combination of testimonies from people who share the same concerns, I try to understand what torments us so much in these images.
Since man has been aware of the world around him, he has not stopped looking at the sky and trying to understand it, bizarre and ghostly entities characterized by the force of gravity populate this world full of uncertainties and mysteries.
What is so disturbing about the cosmos? Is it the perception of existence, spatiality and temporality in the face of infinity? Is it emptiness? This emptiness that at the same time contains the existence of everything. Could it be that what disturbs me is the awareness of my modest size lost in the immensity, reduced to a tiny point in a blue sphere?
As soon as we cross the boundary of what is known, fear arises, because in that moment we become ignorant, we are no longer so sure, we can make mistakes and that is what keeps people stuck in what they know. According to Heidegger, deep down the only fear that exists is the fear of time, because death stops time, the fear of death is actually fear of the moments that were not lived.

(On going)





Joana Dionisio, Portugal, 2023 ©