IT WAS TIME is a photographic project depicting an attempt to find a way to stop time.

During the lockdown, I realised that almost everything can be stopped, except time. This realisation was especially uncomfortable for me when I found myself at a turning point in my life around that time and in a situation where I was forced to wait, while time was running out. In those days, escaping from other people and frequent stays in nature were soothing to me, because it seemed as if time flowed according to different rules in nature. That is when I started contemplating the idea and execution of an imaginary stoppage of time as an antidote to my own time anxiety.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and therefore, like power.

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Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can’t possess

reality, [but] one can possess  images.

In her essay “On photography”, Susan Sontag testifies to its power to manipulate the categories of reality. In Newtonian physics, time passes regardless of whether something happens or not, while according to Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity "there is an inherent time of each particle that is not necessarily identical to the inherent time of other particles or observers”.

To date, it is physically impossible to change the flow of time, yet photography still possesses this ability.

This work represents my own imaginary attempt to alter the flow of time, presented by means of three visual allegories that represent the (impossibility) of dealing with the processes of the passage of time.

STRUCTURING OF TIME I break down the image of a tree root into nine photographs. Each photo depicts a segment and is a composite photo in itself. Arranged together, the photographs represent the details of a visual allegory depicting the notion of time management by breaking it down into smaller units.

STRETCHING OF TIME I use my own face as a landscape, a natural surface on which snails slide. The photographs record the various moments in which the snails cross the surface as stretched out time, without the knowledge of the actual time that has passed between them. Together, they form a representation of the whole face laid out as the surface area.

TURNING BACK TIME Waves crash against the rocks, and the sea returns them in a binary movement of covering or receding. Tracing these movements over a period of time, it is difficult to tell which action happened first. Arranging an even number of photographs that record these actions in an alternating pattern, in a closed loop, it is impossible to tell whether the order in which they are arranged has been altered.

Južina (eng.The Southerly) is a photographic series of self-reflections on my own identity, related to my place of origin. In this project, I investigate to what extent the city I hail from has influenced me, the person I have become, as well as my identity within society.

Split is the city where I was born and where I spent my formative years. I have lived in Zagreb for over 10 years and identify myself as a woman from Split, which carries with it certain implications and expectations. I have been reproached several times for not using my home-town dialect enough in my speech, and once that this makes me lose my identity.

That remark prompted me to think about my identity and it was the starting point for this work.

When I was considering how to approach the city as the subject of my work, before starting to take photographs, I tried to answer several questions:

How much of myself can I find there?

Do I reflect the city I come from?

And does it reflect me?

I set out to explore places that are personally meaningful to me and to intuitively record my own psychological projections. While I remained in certain places, I let my camera work be intuitive.

For me, Split is more than a tourist city with beautiful sights, it is a city where the winds and moods, the people, sea, and architecture intertwine in an organically inextricable way.

The southerly is a specific state of mind that sets in when the warm and humid South-Easterly wind, jugo, blows in, causing a whole range of moods for most people, especially the more sensitive and meteoropaths, of which I am one.

The reason why I chose these weather conditions is that they allow the city to be rendered as it mostly is in the winter, outside the tourist season, empty and uncomfortable, far from the postcard image of a sunny city, which is how people usually perceive it due to media representations. Known only to its residents, frayed by tourism and the post-transition, denied and hidden.

I'm an introverted person by nature and I don't like to see myself in photos, so photographing myself as the subject of a typical self-portrait is quite an uncomfortable event for me. While I was dealing with this theme, my first idea was to approach the topic by photographing my living space and objects that define me, but since I had just moved into an untidy apartment and most of my things were boxed up, that approach didn’t seem viable, so eventually I decided to step out of my comfort zone and put myself in front of the lens. I didn’t want to be literal and enumerative about it, but rather, my intention was to communicate my own attitude towards myself and the outside world. Among the things someone should know about me are some things I don't like people to know, so I camouflaged them by employing several obvious motives. In the bare space of the apartment, I lay myself bare, both metaphorically and literally, and attempt to convey what is otherwise difficult for me to say.

Walking towards infinity helps clear my mind. Living in Zagreb, whenever I feel the need for more self-awareness, I take a long walk along the Sava embankment. Along the way, I notice and record the life that transpires along the empty stretch of land and the bridges across the Sava. The place that separates Zagreb into two parts has no specifically organised infrastructure, therefore humans and nature shape it according to their needs. The motifs I record are snapshots of life by the river, and looking at them I feel as if they are looking back at me.