Angela Blažanović

Sadness I Fold

This body of work started in the intimacy of my bedroom where, after days of crying, I picked up the tissues that were holding my dried up tears. I began to make a small sculptural piece to be hung from my ceiling, in an attempt to transform the heaviness of overwhelming sadness into a structure of lightness; to find a gesture of beauty within the struggles of my mind. 

Depression is non linear. Unsettling thoughts of self-doubt are pierced through by moments of clarity, before fading into oceans of darkness again. 

Similarly, my work oscillates between elements of weight and weightlessness. The waste material holding my bodily fluids is in a constant flux, while I attempt to unfold the potentiality it holds within. After a period of creation, I rework said tissues into small sheets of hand-made paper to be preserved inside a hand-crafted frame. Pain may not disappear through this process, however, it starts to loose saturation.

In my work, I consider vulnerability as an opening for connectivity and strive to invite others into a safe space for collective healing.

Where a rock strives to be a mountain and the lion learns to love the sea

This body of work is a consideration of the fragment as an autonomous form. Contained within itself and completed by its fractured shape, it refuses singularity and is infinitely progressive; pointing towards a presence and remembering an absence; all the while, as open as the sea.

Here, the photographic medium is utilised in order to investigate notions of nostalgia, memory and displacement. It is a journey of coming to terms with my own fractured sense of home and belonging. I explore my diasporic identity while remapping my family’s history; questions of genetic memory and ownership over a place start to emerge.

I was born in Germany, as a child to immigrants from Croatia and Bosnia. Growing up, I formed roots in a place foreign to my ancestors, simultaneously, trying to preserve the roots I had inherited in my mother’s homeland. My identity is built on a hybrid of places, cultures and languages. However, the question of what my home is has remained blurry throughout. I am uprooted.

The project finds its beginning in a darkroom printing session, when using expired photographic paper caused an unexpected result. Because the paper had started to deteriorate, it did not reproduce the correct colours. But more interestingly, within this destruction a new quality was introduced: an uncertainty, a free fall - the entire print was bathed in a magical hue of pink. Following the poetics of chance, the work naturally transcended into the realm of nostalgia and memory.