Verde Saudade

“Verde Saudade” is a deeply personal and reflective project that explores the tension between presence and absence, time and space, and the quiet loss of what once connected us to the natural world.

At the heart of this work is a single object: my chair — a familiar, intimate extension of myself — which I have long used to sit and contemplate the landscape in front of my home. This chair, once positioned in harmony with the natural surroundings, has now become a symbol of longing, protest, and remembrance.

In recent months, the natural space that lay before me has begun to disappear — slowly replaced by cement, machinery, and the promise of urban “progress.” A parking lot is being built where trees once stood, intended to serve the visitors of a gym now rising on the same land. This transformation sparked the creation of this project: a quiet yet powerful visual meditation on the erasure of nature in the name of development and capital.

Through a series of photographs, I placed the chair in strategically chosen natural locations — places I walk through, admire, and emotionally connect to. These are spaces that, like the one in front of my home, are at risk of vanishing. In each image, the chair appears alone, evoking the presence of absence — my absence, nature’s fading presence, and the inevitable passage of time.

The chair becomes a poetic witness: it holds space where I once sat, where I once watched the trees dance and the light change. Now, it symbolizes what is there, but no longer truly present — what remains only in memory, in longing, in the aching shade of green we call “saudade.”

“Verde Saudade” is a call to awareness. A tribute. A quiet resistance. It asks us to consider what we lose when we pave over the wild — not just in trees and soil, but in identity, rhythm, and emotional grounding. It speaks to the urgency of preservation, not just for nature itself, but for what it means to us as human beings.