This project began as a conversation about memory and belonging. Sanja approached me with a body of work reflecting on her childhood and the experience of leaving Yugoslavia for Australia. The project moves between personal archives, staged imagery, and fragments of family history, exploring the quiet complexity of growing up between cultures.

Our focus was to shape the material into a coherent visual narrative while preserving the emotional ambiguity at the centre of the work. Archival imagery, portraits, and atmospheric photographs come together to form a layered story about memory and belonging. Rather than being treated as individual pieces, the photographs are presented as moments within a sequence. Scale, spacing and rhythm were carefully considered so the images could breathe and build meaning through juxtaposition.

Sanja’s first photobook ‘It is always lush and warm in the middle of nowhere’, was shortlisted for the Australian Photobook Awards 2022.