DEAR ORCHID
There are no photographs from the year my sisters, eight and ten at the time, fled Sarajevo at the beginning of the war. What remains is a diary, written by my oldest sister. She wrote through displacement, and that writing became the only testimony in our family archive that speaks to a time I did not witness but have come to know through her words and the stories passed down within our family—a time that has deeply impacted the course of our lives and continues to shape my sense of family, identity, and belonging.
The diary covers a period from spring 1992 to winter 1993, during which they moved through several temporary homes across Croatia before eventually settling in Zagreb. In Dear Orchid, I return to these places with my other sister and our father. Using the diary as a guide, we traced a path from Sarajevo to Hvar, Jelsa, and finally Zagreb, revisiting landscapes carrying the memory of their displacement.
This act of return, personal, political, and embodied—asks how the postwar generation might carry its inheritances with care and responsibility. To engage with the archive is to engage with history not as past, but as structure, active, transmitted, and embedded in the present, carried through generations of sisterhood. The archive, like grief, demands to be held, as something unfinished, unresolved, and still urgently alive.
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