touchstone

Does the stone hold memories inside its monolith?

In one of my mother’s closets, I found a box of old negatives and small prints—fragments of my earliest years with my parents. As a teenager, I returned to that box countless times, unsure if I had forgotten those moments or if they ever existed in my memory at all.

Growing up with divorced parents, those photographs left an imprint that words often failed to capture but other images could express. I began digitising the archive and revisiting the places of my childhood to reconcile with an environment I had left in my early twenties. The political borders around natural entities in my birthplace echoed my sense of being split. The Soča-Isonzo River, flowing from Slovenia to Italy, helped me connect the bigger dots, and I followed its path from source to mouth, observing the state of its water and collecting stones along the way.

"touchstone" is the second book dummy I created for this project. This ongoing work is ageing with me, unfolding in several intertwined chapters and forms that explore memory, belonging, and familial love while touching the theme of environmental personhood.