Son to a Dutch mother and a father from the former Yugoslavia, I was raised in the space between two distinct cultures. My father – a Serb – came from a small village in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He met my mother whilst working in Slovenia, joining her in the Netherlands before the outbreak of civil war in the 1990s. They married, they built a life together, they had children, they later separated.

Growing up between homes – forever moving back-and-forth – my sense of belonging was further destabilised. Later, in 2019, my father’s death left another big void in me. It triggered questions about a part of my heritage I hadn’t fully understood before. I wondered where my father had come from, how his own culture had shaped him into the man I knew, and what my own life might have looked like had I been born elsewhere. Ultimately, these questions were a reflection of my own position; never fully Dutch, but always dislocated from my roots.

I took the time to go on a journey and explore my father’s birthplace, to seek out my own sense of home there. It was a different trip to the ones I’d made as a child, taken every other summer with my father. I walked the same roads he would have walked as a kid, visited places he went to as a young man, met with people who knew him, befriended others who might never have crossed his path. I traced him in strangers’ faces, in their gestures, in the landscape – from rolling hills to bumpy roads, or the building blocks of unfinished houses.

He was there. And at last, so was I.