Where a rock strives to be a mountain and the lion learns to love the sea
This body of work is a consideration of the fragment as an autonomous form. Contained within itself and completed by its fractured shape, it refuses singularity and is infinitely progressive; pointing towards a presence and remembering an absence; all the while, as open as the sea.
Here, the photographic medium is utilised in order to investigate notions of nostalgia, memory and displacement. It is a journey of coming to terms with my own fractured sense of home and belonging. I explore my diasporic identity while remapping my family’s history; questions of genetic memory and ownership over a place start to emerge.
I was born in Germany, as a child to immigrants from Croatia and Bosnia. Growing up, I formed roots in a place foreign to my ancestors, simultaneously, trying to preserve the roots I had inherited in my mother’s homeland. My identity is built on a hybrid of places, cultures and languages. However, the question of what my home is has remained blurry throughout. I am uprooted.
The project finds its beginning in a darkroom printing session, when using expired photographic paper caused an unexpected result. Because the paper had started to deteriorate, it did not reproduce the correct colours. But more interestingly, within this destruction a new quality was introduced: an uncertainty, a free fall - the entire print was bathed in a magical hue of pink. Following the poetics of chance, the work naturally transcended into the realm of nostalgia and memory.
