I was 3 years old when my family – my mother, my father, and my 5-year-old sister – moved into a new apartment in a smaller Croatian town in Yugoslavia.
The town was just beginning to grow, and our new apartment was on the third floor of a shiny prefab building, right in the middle of a massive construction site with towering cranes that were conjuring up new, magnificent concrete wonders from the earth, which shone in the sun on the open horizon.
My childhood was naive. We believed that solidarity and friendship were the values that would overcome everything. My parents thought they would never grow old, and the great brutalist architecture with its thousands of apartments for everyone confirmed that feeling of boundlessness, abundance, and outlook. The concrete seemed simply invincible and eternal. I have always found prefabricated buildings and high-rises genuinely beautiful, even breathtakingly beautiful. In their imposing majesty and generosity, they had something maternal and protective. With hundreds of lights flickering from the hundreds of apartments, they always conveyed a sense of unity, warmth, and liveliness.
The naivety of my childhood was then quickly and quite brutally destroyed. Solidarity and friendship turned overnight into hate and violence. The war began. That same night, I found out that my mother was a Serb from Bosnia, my father a Croat, their marriage was referred to as a "mixed marriage," and my mother, who had been a proud communist until then, had to hide. I stood there, 14 years old, fleeing the bombs to the basement of our prefab building, disoriented, lost, and confused. After the war, no brick was left in place, and I no longer truly understood the world. That feeling of being "in the wrong film" never really left me after that. Migration has only deepened it. It has remained, like a glitch in the system, a broken TV picture – something frozen, paused, something that never really started again.
Image 1: Richter's high-rises, so-called "rockets," Zagreb, Croatia
Image source: Anshul Raja
Image 2: Genex Tower, Belgrade, Serbia
Image source: Błażej Pindor
Image 3: A ruin in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Image source unknown
Digital manipulated photos printed as wall tapestries on concrete panels. 150 x 120 cm, 2024.