Born 1979, Rijeka, Croatia

Folded Memories and Fragments of Family Histories Handkerchief textiles and wooden box

From my father's belongings, I kept one quite inexpensive watch and several old-fashioned handkerchiefs bearing visible traces of use. I have been saving it for a long time without any clear idea what to do with it. During lockdown period in 2020, I took it out and started weaving text on the fabric, contemplating the idea of a shelter as a mental space. It made me think of complexity of human relations, fragrance of memory, some long lost people and forgotten life periods. Handkerchief as an outdated, redundant item, often overly used and abandoned in the back of the closet, is a nice metaphor in itself The fabric is full of scars and broken edges, bearing traces of hands and faces, habits and emotions. Weaving lines on the fragile fabric proved as perfect means of communication, searching for words inside the artefacts that remained, interlaying it with the treads of the material. As I had just a few of my father's handkerchiefs,afterwards I started collecting objects and rethinking donated artefacts, intertwining memories of from friends and family, imagining connections, finding words in the "space between''. By the end of life, when they could not work anymore, my grandparents made efforts to shape their life into a story they could leave as a heritage. They had a need to retell the memories of the events that marked their life and the lives of the people close to them (their parent, relatives, neighbours..). At first I listened to it as to marginal anecdotes for some long lost times, but eventually I started to discover a lot of similarities with current events and contemporary crisis. They were talking about ordinary people coping with the realities war, refugees’traumas, post war poverty, underpaid work resembling feudal working conditions – about a life marked by everyday existential struggles – about injustices, delusions and inability to cope with unstable social and economic systems. The conversations irreversibly changed my sense of time and it seemed that I was reaching for the future, by trying to understand long gone family stories. Eventually I started weaving fragments of conversations on used, worn out handkerchiefs that remained after my grandfather,using awkward, simple words with which the stories were told. The fabric of the handkerchief is full of scars, tracks of hand and faces, habits and emotions and carries a story by itself. Adding a track of thoughts into the worn out fabric I was establishing communication with the lived time, recognizing words in the artifacts. Ana Vivoda was born 1979 in Rijeka. In 2002 she graduated from the Department of Visual Arts of the Faculty of Philosophy at theUniversity of Rijeka, finished her postgraduate studies (Project Studies) at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm, Sweden, completed Doctoral studies at Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia. Works as Full Professor at the University in Zadar. Her practice involves print and drawing installations and artist books dealing with questions of identity, feminist or environmental issues, while her art educational projects nourish collaborative and participatory aspects of art. She held eleven solo exhibitions (Croatia, Spain, Serbia) and has participated in numerous collective exhibitions in the country and abroad (Poland, China, UK, Germany USA, Taiwan, France, Japan, Spain, Argentina, Portugal, Armenia, Egypt).