Tomislav Marcijuš - Our Embrace Will Be Long Like the Waiting
Tomislav Marcijuš’s series titled Our Embrace Will Be Long Like the Waiting follows a personal, universal story of family and loss, and belonging. It moves through themes of identity, migration, and spatial and emotional borders, with my mother at the center of everything. Today, she lives between Baranja, where she raised her family, and her native village of Stanari in Bosnia, where she occasionally visits her brother and sister, as well as the graves of her parents and another brother who died in the war.
These travels are not mere returns, but rituals of remembrance and resilience, crossing borders carved by history and politics into the body and the soul. Her journey is marked by silent gestures: lighting a candle, touching the soil, or visiting a cemetery.
“Through photographs, handwritten notes, household objects, and symbols such as coal, wax, and gold, I weave a visual and emotional archive of a woman who bridges worlds. The project is both intimate and collective, revealing how trauma, migration, and distance shape identity and how love persists across time and separation.
The title is drawn from a verse by poet Desanka Maksimović, echoing both a literal embrace between two sisters divided by war and a metaphorical embrace that connects what was once torn apart. This story is about absence, presence, and the hope that some reunions – someday, somewhere – will last as long as the waiting that preceded them.”
