THE BIG HELLO, THE BIG GOODBYE

The Big Hello, The Big Goodbye is a project that was born in my early 40s as a natural part of my internal dialogue and my environment. Some women in my circle became mothers for the first time in their lives, others became grandmothers, still others made radical career changes or sent their children on their way, fought harsh medical diagnoses, learned to accept their changing bodies or renegotiated them, refusing to be invisible, changing the rules of the game. 

Each one of us has two worlds. Having once tried to approach the world from the outside, I started diligently trying to reach the world from the inside. Is there such a thing as growing old with dignity? We exist, reflected in the answer – the mirror of society. It’s not always about whether we like ourselves, feeling good in our skin. It’s often about being able to trust that other people will continue to like us if we don’t accept and perform the socially acceptable roles that fit the label of “a 40-something woman”. 

Identity and authenticity do not always go together well. How can I achieve what they want?

How do I keep my dreams while fitting the roles and expectations of others? Each one of these roles has a use-by date – the sexual object receives desire and admiration, the mother must answer to all sorts of needs and requirements. What am I ready to lose? What is worth its salt? Every day becomes important. I don’t miss a chance to stay in place. And if I don’t succeed, I’m thinking of ways to hold on to my place and not disappear in the shadow of patriarchal society, be it as an object or as a consumer of promises of beauty, eternal youth, male loyalty, perfect children, etc.

Women have always been in a state of emergency, emerging outside the norm, outside the social patriarchal agenda, outside culture (closer to nature), outside the language that structurally manipulates their bodies and their property without ever inscribing them fully. 

One half of humankind looks and acts in a certain way, but what does it create and what does it say? After economic progress, after the advancement in science and medicine, after the visible improvement in lifestyle, after women have a certain freedom to get educated, to work, to decide whether they want to be mothers or not, to leave partners that are wrong for them, to love other women, they are still in a state of emergency. Every day one half of the humanity has to invent new ways to manage what goes unspoken because nobody wants to see it. Because she carries the humanity of the species – the pain and the fear, and the hope, and the lack of words – in her body. The fact that girls today write codes and don’t wear corsets, the fact that they smoke and travel the world is progress indeed, but in each culture the woman is aware of the unspoken hatred towards womanhood, of the unwritten rules, of the silence and isolation. 

My work explores what the 40-something woman has to say. Each one invents her vision, her style, her way of fitting into her everyday life. 

What is life without the little joys and freedoms of invention? In the globalized world, the world of images, of infantile consumption, of immediate answers to every need, of the illusion of eternal youth, not all 40-something women are trying to please. I met, I listened to, and photographed 40-something women that each day stuck their tongues out at this emergency state of misery, at this existential crisis, at the idea of the aging woman. Women don’t just grow old, they find ways to manage the idea of aging. The Big Hello, the Big Goodbye is also a portrait in words, the portrait of a collective voice speaking about the internal compass of our emotional loyalty. I was trying to capture and share the moment the woman cracks the norm, cracks the expectation, the ideal that has been imposed on her, and chooses the freedom to love life and herself: to do so quietly or with the power of a volcanic eruption, with her body, her hands, her words, her art. The ability to go beyond the suffering that 40-something women accumulate slowly but surely. The 40-something woman loves, makes love, gives birth, supports her loved ones, goes to the seaside with other women. She talks about the isolation of the closed space labelled “acceptable behavior”, “proper behavior”, “feminine charm”, “motherly love”, “respect to one’s family and employer”.  

I was striving to capture that intimate space between language, the social landscape, and her body. 

The 40-something woman is a master of illusions. 

(Vesselina Nikolaeva)