Emanation

Drawing on my family history, I fuse archival war images with traditional handwork. Through projection and re-photography, images emerge that weave tenderness and violence, showing how memory and care can transform trauma into solace.

The war in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s is a history that resonates deeply. My Croatian grandparents fled an earlier war, World War II. As a child I saw how this new conflict reopened old wounds in my grandfather. His anger and grief made me aware of the deep scars war leaves behind.

I delved into this history, trying to understand how such a horrific war could have unfolded. I consumed everything I could find: books, survivor testimonies from the Yugoslavia Tribunal, documentaries. On YouTube, I came across raw VHS footage showing destruction, death, and loss. The events I had read about were suddenly right in front of me. The endless stream of horrific recordings deeply unsettled me.
I felt a need to keep this history from fading, to keep it visible, and to honour those whose lives were lost or broken.

I thought of the textile handwork I inherited from my grandmother. Delicate weavings, lacework, and embroidery, passed down through generations of women, all made with time, care, and devotion. That tenderness stood in stark contrast to the images of violence, where in an instant everything so carefully built was wiped away.

This led me to the idea of projecting stills from war footage onto the textiles and re-photographing them. Not only those from my grandmother, but also pieces gathered from across the entire former Yugoslavia.

The act of projection is essential: the light that once illuminated these atrocities is now reflected again onto fabrics that carry personal and collective memory. It allows for images to emerge in the moment - balancing between tenderness and violence, stillness and confrontation. The textiles soften the brutality of the images, not to erase it, but to allow us to face it with compassion.

For me this process of projection and re-photography is a quiet act of healing. Solace is found not in forgetting but in the act of seeing, remembering, and transforming loss into something tangible.