BEING AND NOTHINGNESS

Being and Nothingness is a project that seeks to evidence the spiritual connections between humans and nature emphasising ideas of commonality, well-being and mindfulness. The dialectical relationship between the human being and nature has been a constant subject since the eighteenth century having the romantic notion of the ‘sublime’ reviving over and over again in the Art History. However, little research has been undertaken when it comes to illustrate thoughtful awareness of sharing experiences from the ‘common’ within the boundaries of the sea.

With the title of this work, Andrea Hamilton pays tribute to Jean-Paul Sartre’s homonymous essay on phenomenological ontology which explains that, as human beings, we are conscious for ourselves but also for others in a reciprocal manner. In his celebrated text, the French author defended the individual’s existence over the individual’s essence. Sartre thought that consciousness does not make sense by itself as it is always consciousness of something, whether this ‘something’ is a person or a place.

In Being and Nothingness the body meets the sea and a sense of peacefulness invade us. It puts together persons and places on an attempt at looking for individual existences in symbiosis with nature where the relationship between the two is based on care and affects. This series of images shows the beaches of Ibiza from an uncommon point of view far from notions of consumerism and tourism. In a way, they intend to send the message that only by being conscious of ourselves as individuals, we can get a good or satisfactory condition of existence, that is, in other words, the definition of well-being. 

A state characterized by health, happiness, and prosperity in relation to the self; hence the others.