As a young girl, I used to daydream with my grandfather about the possibility of one day living in Croatia. It was the country where he had said goodbye to his family as a young soldier and where he didn't return until after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was a place that had brought him much sorrow and anger, yet he had always remained proud of it, a pride he had passed on to me. I felt connected to a land I didn't truly know and whose language I didn't speak.

When I traveled to the village in Croatia where my grandfather had grown up, I had hoped to feel at home there, but the residents and even my own family members remained strangers to me. I also sensed an odd tension between the seemingly tranquil village life and the images in my mind of the conflicted and violent history of this country.

In the project 'Constructed Identity', subtle connections emerge between old family photos and pictures I took in the Croatian village. These images convey a certain melancholy, and beneath the surface, one can feel the history of former Yugoslavia, a state where manufactured nationalism and ethnic pride still lead to tensions.