Nostalgia Ultra

Nostalgia Ultra

Nostalgia Ultra is a project about memory and displacement.

The question “where are you from ?” used to make me uncomfortable. With time I settled on this answer: "I was born in Guinea but grew up in Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal". Truth is, of these three places Côte d’Ivoire is the only one that has ever felt like home. A civil war broke out in Côte d’Ivoire In 2002 and in November of that year parents decided that it would be best to leave the country. I was 13 years old. In April 2021, I finally convinced my sister Aïcha to visit me. This was her first time back. Nearly 20 years had gone by. My sister kept a journal during the two weeks we spent together. The project looks at the pull of nostalgia through a mix of new photographs, my sister’s journal entries, and archival images from our family albums. The intention of this collaboration was to make peace with the past. However ultimately as my sister put in writing: "a catharsis isn’t going to happen".