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 – 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 – 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 – 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 – pots, an old clock, photographs – 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 – 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 – silent but full of emotion – 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 – written in light, absence, and closeness. It is my form of redemption for the moments when I wasn't closer, didn't understand, or didn't help. Maybe I didn't know how. I'm sorry.
The project'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 – someday, somewhere, further away – will last a long time, like the waiting that shaped us here.
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Note: All notes and photographs are presented in Cyrillic. This visual and linguistic framework is part of the story's authenticity, rooted in Stanari, Bosnia and Herzegovina, within the Republika Srpska.