Delta Oscar Mike, 2019

By questioning my own family heritage, I question the interconnectedness of individual family identities and the tradition of seafaring. Going on a two-month vessel voyage, along the shores of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and West Africa, I try to redefine my family’s seafaring tradition, while at the same time looking for a place of my own in that male-dominated space.

When decoded from the NATO phonetic alphabet, used to communicate more effectively in a maritime context, the seemingly unrelated words “Delta Oscar Mike” spell out D-O-M (Croatian for “home”), and at the same time describe both the ship and the home. The complexity of the relationship between the apparent antipodes of ship and home is contrasted by motifs of a maritime landscape and the interior of a cargo ship. In the form of an anti-logbook, I capture fragments of everyday life in photographs, while the representation of the spaces alternates from intimate and poetic, to a descriptive and mundane understanding of the space of the ship.

I bear witness to the reflexive and intuitive gaze of the Other, and I feel the space of the ship simultaneously in opposites – far and near, mine and theirs, and yet all of it as my fragmented self.