The iris flower symbolizes faith, hope, wisdom, and the transition between worlds. In many cultures, people associate iris flowers with spirituality and death. These blooms often brighten cemeteries.

Before Baranja, there was you. This series follows a personal universal story of family, loss, and belonging. It moves through themes of identity, migration, and spatial and emotional borders, with my mother at the center of everything. Today, she lives between Baranja, where she raised her family, and her native village of Stanari in Bosnia, where she occasionally visits her brother and sister, as well as the graves of her parents and another brother who died in the war.These occasional travels to Bosnia are not escapes, nor returns &ndash; they are rituals of belonging: walks across borders carved by history, politics, and time into space and body. Visiting the cemetery becomes her quiet remembrance &ndash; a dialogue with what remains, and with those you can no longer reach by hand, but still can with your heart.This story emerges from a place marked by industry and hard physical labor &ndash; the mine where her brothers worked and the nearby thermal power plant symbolize collective life. I take coal and gold as symbols of work and value, which my mother carries, and candle wax as a reminder of transience and memory. The project also includes objects from the home &ndash; pots, an old clock, photographs &ndash; not just everyday items, but traces of presence. You can still feel the scent, human warmth, labor, and atmosphere in them.This work is not just a personal archive, but a story about a connection that transcends time, war, and separation. Two sisters left Bosnia together and went to Croatia, but the war in the new state separated them &ndash; one stayed in occupied Baranja, the other in Osijek. For four years, they had no contact with each other and their families in Bosnia. They met again in Baja, which served as neutral ground in Hungary, where a refugee camp was located. One traveled through Croatia, while the other came from Serbia. That encounter &ndash; silent but full of emotion &ndash; embodies everything this series carries: the trace of war and the quiet strength of a woman to preserve, endure, and reconnect what was separated.A mother is like a bridge. Through her, spaces connect, and the past and present find a common language. In her simplicity and perseverance, there is a quiet resistance to forgetting. Through this series, her story becomes mine &ndash; written in light, absence, and closeness. It is my form of redemption for the moments when I wasn&#39;t closer, didn&#39;t understand, or didn&#39;t help. Maybe I didn&#39;t know how. I&#39;m sorry.The project&#39;s title comes from a poem by Desanka Maksimović, also the name of the school in Stanari that my mother attended. The verse is a tribute to the embrace between her and her sister, but also a quiet hope that our encounters with those we have lost &ndash; someday, somewhere, further away &ndash; will last a long time, like the waiting that shaped us here.-Note:&nbsp;All notes and photographs are presented in Cyrillic. This visual and linguistic framework is part of the story&#39;s authenticity, rooted in Stanari, Bosnia and Herzegovina, within the Republika Srpska.

OUR EMBRACE WILL BE LONG, LIKE THE WAITING

If someone asks you about Stanari, tell them it's the most beautiful place in the world, where everything begins and ends. Angelina, November 2022. My mother's quote.

"Portrait of Five Siblings" is a collage work created from small ID photos of my mother, two aunts, and two uncles.

Coal from the "Stanari" mine with my mother's gold symbolizes hard physical labor, and a candle that symbolizes transience and memory.

A "map" of my mother's belongings, tracing fragments of her life and origin: a church, a statue of Tito, her Yugoslav and early Croatian ID cards, a grave portrait of her parents, and a statue of Leo – her zodiac sign. A music CD by Gordana Stojičević, she often listened to, and a cigarette, sometimes left beside cemetery candles for those who smoked.

The photo shows my mother's brothers — Miroslav on the right, who has passed away, and Tomislav on the left, after whom I was named. A double exposure of the scans highlights their resemblance.

The envelope my mother used to send a letter to her family in Stanari during the war.

My mother received this letter from her sister Ruža during the Homeland War, pt.I

My mother received this letter from her sister Ruža during the Homeland War, pt.II

My mother received this letter from her brother Tomislav a few years after the war. At that time, communication was still difficult due to the lack of internet and limited access to phones. pt.I

Three scanned photographs — my parents' wedding (my mother, wearing a wedding dress sewn by my late grandmother Anuška.), my birth, and a portrait taken during the Homeland War — mark the beginning of a family and a new life, but also rapid changes.

The rosary is located at the shrine "Vodica Máriakert Kegyhely" in Hungary, near the Serbian border and not far from where people met during the Homeland War.

This is a photo of my late grandmother, Rosa, alongside the poem "You Promised That You Would Be Eternal" by Desanka Maksimović.

Three generations of women: my mother and aunt, held by my late grandmother and aunt Bosiljka.

Portrait of my mother's two sisters, Ruža and Bosiljka.

"Beloved ones don't die while they are loved by those who are still alive."

"Our embrace will be long, like the waiting."

This is a personal and poetic photo series exploring family, memory, war, and migration. It is centered around the quiet strength of a mother moving between Baranja and Bosnia.

OUR EMBRACE WILL BE LONG, LIKE THE WAITING - TOMISLAV MARCIJUŠ

On the edge of the poetic and the real, the rural and the tender Every leaving takes us back to some beginning and teaches us to discover something new within ourselves. We are the consequence of all those who were there before us. The legacy of our families, good and bad, is all part of who we are. Unlike the cities we rush to, everything in village life is a matter of the community, not the individual. As a child, unfortunately, I did not understand this. This series of photographs is part of a community, environment, and learning. Time and people pass, and we miss them because of the unrest we sometimes struggle with; I return to that forgotten space with this project.Baranja is the place of my roots. A dreamy region where life passes slowly and where you feel nostalgia for all seasons. Baranja is a diverse and tame landscape where the misty fields remind me of a dream from which I never woke up. Where winter is so endless and where the arson has its beauty of scent. Baranja is a melancholy part of Eastern Croatia that has influenced my work, behavior, and way of life. We are not talking here only about the nature and landscapes of Baranja; in her, all life is one!The project shows the days in the countryside and the desire to escape from it, which permeated me in not knowing that I grew up in the most beautiful environment. In a dreamy fog, with the most important people in my life. In searching for something better and more significant, we forget about the space and the people around us. Likewise, we don&#39;t look at minor signs along the way that ultimately lead to big things we only dreamed about before.The feeling stands; I carry all those places in Baranja that I photographed at the beginning, wherever I went, unconsciously transferring all emotions to my future ideas. Lyrical photographs in front of you, created over the last ten years, intimately question how much control we have over ourselves to influence what we&#39;ll become through landscapes and years. for Anu&scaron;ka, Angelina and Mihajlo

BARANJA DREAMING

Personal photography project about life and moments in Baranja

BARANJA DREAMING - TOMISLAV MARCIJUŠ

A photographic project that delves into the spheres of identity and the preservation of memories of summer youth. For the last few years, I have been capturing the aesthetics of my Adriatic coast in my photos, a feeling that arose from the summers I spent on various islands and places along the coast.&nbsp;I was born in Osijek, the eastern part of Croatia, and my family comes from Baranja. Every summer vacation, we traveled to the Adriatic Sea; they loved that way of life. This is the greatest love for them, even today. The experiences you often go through as a child remain a part of you forever but are somehow stronger when you become aware of them in more mature years. These are the impressions that summer and vacation left on my youth. Hotel complexes still smell the same as in the Yugoslavian era. The smell of fresh fish on the waterfront, pine trees and fresh fruit, and the ferry&#39;s interior. These are photographs through which nostalgia lives.&nbsp;Man changes over the years, and everything around him, but the sea seems to remain the same; only for you, it means something else. As a child, I left all my energy in the sea while jumping off piers and diving underwater. Now, the Adriatic Sea means something else to me. Now I come there to talk to him and let all the bad thoughts and feelings into the water so the sea takes them somewhere far away.The Adriatic Sea was an escape for my late grandmother and my mother during the Croatian Homeland War. After that, the Adriatic became my family&#39;s only place for an annual vacation. At one point, you think the sea has countless meanings for you. It is one big surface area to which you often say &quot;Nevermore,&quot; and then you return to it again. The days of the Adriatic are one of the most beautiful days of my youth, and that&#39;s why I still love to swim far in that blue.

ADRIATIC NOSTALGIA

a boat in the water under a cloudy sky, Zadar. By Tomislav Marcijuš


a stairway leading to a body of water on Mali Lošinj by Tomislav Marcijuš


Adriatic Nostalgia" is a heartfelt photographic journey capturing the timeless essence of summer on the Adriatic coast. Through vivid images, this album explores the deep connections and lasting memories of youth, family vacations, and the enduring solace found in the sea's embrace