There are times when you get involved in a project and you work on it without thinking about the future or about what will happen to that project once it gets unveiled. And so when artist Sayaka Maruyama invited me to contribute with my words to her images for the fourth issue of Pan & The Dream, a luxuriously produced supersized magazine published annually and edited by Nathalie Agussol, I just jumped at the prospect.
The volume was supposed to have a theme - Ghost Stories. Not spooky ghosts, but memories, dreams, the departed, our guardian angels, the beauty and the mystery of the otherworldly. And so we set onto exploring this world and Sayaka took beautiful and ethereal images featuring floral wearable sculptures made with a 3D pen by Japanese designer Seiran Tsuno and inspired by out-of-the-body experiences and wigs by Tomihiro Kono.
Then COVID-19 came and disrupted some of our plans, changed our lives and deeply touched us. All of us. And ghosts were suddenly haunting us, the ghost of an invisible virus, the ghosts of all its victims. Sayaka's pictures and my words assumed a new meaning, they gained a new aim and purpose - encouraging people who lost dear ones during the pandemic, who couldn't hug them for one last time and who couldn't pay them a final tribute with a funeral and who are still going through the beareavement process.
So take the photoshoot and the words accompanying it as a postcard that will hopefully bring hope and inspire us to go forward in life even when our hearts seem permanently broken and we can't seem to find a reason for living anymore.
You can get a copy of Pan & The Dream (with a cover by Marcus Schaefer) from selected stores and bookshops such as Magalleria, Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum and Gigina.
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