at home - kod nas doma

At home – kod nas doma – is a project that explores the ways of belonging through the performance of identity. It focuses on the daily activities that make our identity and the performance of them in order to belong to a community when we are away from home. The project draws inspiration from my Croatian heritage and my personal experiences of belonging from afar. I’ve created a memory box filled with various aspects of my culture and heritage that can be used when one feels nostalgic for home. The object serves as a source of identity and memories, not just for me but for other Croats no longer living in Croatia. Within this box, I wanted to include ways to engage all of the senses and create an immersive experience of exploring cultural heritage. It includes stories about heritage, recipes, a playlist, postage stamps, postcards and scent squares. I have also made a book that contains all of the things included in the box and explains each one.

The concept of identity has always been fascinating to me, it is complex and dependent on everybody, their perception, their thoughts, and experiences. Identity is how we present ourselves to the world and in turn how others perceive us moving through the world, ever changing and evolving. I’ve never been particularly focused on my national identity until I moved to the UK. It was something I was aware of but hadn’t paid much attention to because I simply didn’t have to. In Croatia I never questioned what mundane things I participated in made me Croatian, I shared the same experiences with those around me.

I’ve been in the UK for six years now and the question I found myself answering more and more was “Where are you from?”. This question quickly evolves into conversations around language, food, and shared traditions. In these conversations we find ourselves comparing cultures, diligently trying to find something we have in common, something that we share – “We do that as well!” and “Oh, we have something similar!”. These conversations became a way to connect with others who, like me, were navigating the delicate balance between preserving cultural roots and embracing new influences. All over the world, we all do the same things and perform the same daily rituals but just a little different, different enough for us to claim it as something particularly our own.

Our national identity is given a name after the country we were born in, the borders it claims as its own, yet identity can’t be contained in those borders. National identity is something that is collected, something that comes from the history of the people that occupy it, taken and made over into something new, something just a bit different. We share parts of our identity with different cultures, because we were once part of the same country or because we share borders.