Illusionary Recollection

A Borrowed Nostalgia

Illusionary Recollection is built on one specific feeling, the nostalgia for a time or place you have never actually known. A memory with no event behind it, a longing for something that was never yours to lose. The project sets out to give that feeling a shape.

It began as a personal project by Asan Dia, a Ukrainian photographer who works in romance and longing, and the whole thing grew out of a single face. The story was not written first and then cast. It went the other way. Spirit³ found the face, and the narrative followed it. That is the rarest thing casting can do, start a project rather than serve one.

Which is why the page keeps the figure unresolved. A fashion film carries the feeling, and the still leaves him in motion and out of reach, because the subject was never really the person. It was the memory the person pulled up, the one you cannot quite place.

Illusionary Recollection. A memory of somewhere you have never been, cast before it was ever written.

Casting| Spirit³

Producer| Iman Mariah

Photographer| Asan Dia

Stylist| Sasha Spence

DOP| Andreea Mighiu

Model| Ed Puddington