Nostalgia, Memory and Spatial Consolations

Tracing out how space can host and feed memory narratives, this chapter presents the book’s core concept: the “space for nostalgia”. In these pages, I define how space can provide consolation for nostalgic yearning through constructed discourses that forge continuity between the present and the past. Here I describe the specific characteristics of the space for nostalgia, highlighting the differences from its counterpart with a fundamental (and prepositional) distinction—the space of nostalgia—which implies a dissimilar model of return. Moreover, this chapter untangles the close relationship between the “irreversibility of time” and “spatial consolation” in the space for nostalgia. I stress here an important clarification: this category does not imply the need for a spatial return, that is, the nostalgic subject does not desire the absent space but rather the absent time. Space serves as a connecting structure, indulging romanticized memories with indexical connections. In this way, this chapter points out my idea of “spatial consolation”, understood simultaneously as (i) the comfort and illusion used to satisfy desires for an impossible return, and (ii) as a strategy to work through the ontological finitude of lost temporality.