Tensions run high, family interventions omnipresent, fatigue embraced. It was more than love, at least more than the love between us. When we got married a number of years ago, what we realized from our marriage that it was also about navigating the endless push and pulls of everything and everyone around us. We were not there just for our love, or even love itself but for all that is to life. The trials and tribulations, the excitements and weariness, fascinations and irritations, everything encapsulated within the ritual of marriage. That is why we believe that rituals including marriage rituals provide us with a pathway, an insight, or a glimpse for understanding the complexities of human relationships. Of our relationships with everything and everyone around us.

 

As years pass by we have now come to see and understand that wedding rituals represent the non-binary, multi-dimensional complexities of us human beings. It’s never just simply black and white. It is a ceremony that not only celebrates both an end and a beginning but it is perhaps also a moment for us to bear witness to the unknown realm of in-betweenness, the transition from an end to a beginning. A moment that gives birth to happiness and tragedy, anxieties from uncertainties, fears of regrets and loss, animated feelings of warmth and intimacy from the possibilities of the joys of tomorrow. It can be both humanizing and dehumanizing, having us engrossed in the elation of love and the banality of mass-consumption, and it is through that weddings can be both sacred and banal. It is a mad mixture of everything there is to life, it is messy, it is complex, it is, in essence, to be human. If rituals are so central to our being, and the forming of our being, then it is that which needs to be understood.

 

Nuans is our small attempt in doing so through the language of visual storytelling. To visualize the complex nature of not only these rituals but also the people attached to it. Because of this, Nuans will forever be a project. Not much is set in stone other than our sense of curiosity, wills and commitments. It is a personal project to understand what it means to be human. It is most definitely a project about you and also about us. What we hope to do is to understand more than love, more than to visually crystallize that thing we think is love. Not only do we believe that love which has been crystallized, whether in our memories or images, is love of the past, love that is static, love that is dead, but isn’t life so much more than just love? To limit life just to love, is to limit life itself and to limit life is to limit us in being human. Marriage is so much more than love and we at Nuans hope to understand this.