It is said that sense of home develops when one's connection to a place carries particular emotional qualities.
I feel journey to home, finding belonging, and defining roots is deeply individual process.
Throughout the years my family gradually dissolved either through deaths, migration, or large geographical distances. This was among the first photos of my family in Bosnia taken right after the war.
Loosing my family was one of the hardest and the most painful experiences I've been through so far. I went through waves of immense sadness, grieving, deep anger, guilt, even shame, and desperate need to have family. I would come across articles about importance of family and being exposed by the explosion of family photos from social media that serve that image of filtered life.
On that complex emotional journey I learned that the biggest hardships can be always transformed into our strength and finding alternative ways of living, defining our own family, giving ourselves permission to create new places, and new templates in our lives.
These experiences served me as one of the biggest inspiration to create art works, use stories as medicine, and tell them through creative means.
I learned how to build home inside of me. I made my peace that is if fine to feel rootless and not having sense of belonging to any particular place, it gave me wide eyes to see the whole world as my country.
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