”Fear Not, For You Have Sons in Europe” is a search for roots and meaning from the perspective of the Yugoslav diaspora. A project that came into being after seeing the decay that had overtaken my mother’s birth village, together with my final grandparents passing. As I saw my final tie with a non-existent Yugoslavia disappear, the aftermath of war and migration had caught up to my own place of birth.

When we leave our home country, the pictures, stories, and nostalgia we have towards this place remain untouched. But untouched, space itself decays – leaving us no place to return to. How do we relate to this dichotomy of migration? What happens when our ideological place of belonging is no longer upheld by physical structures? Especially when we are haunted by a past we cannot return to, and a future that will never arrive.

In exploring these spaces of decay, the project finds itself in a place between fantasy and reality, questioning the threshold between the two. How real is a place of ideological belonging, even when it doesn’t exist anymore? To what degree are the spaces we remember rooted in fantasy? In searching for this threshold we might find solace in our fate of migration. So where do we go from here? How do we give place to which has been left to decay?

Many people, including my grandparents, watched their children leave for a better life outside, together with the silent hope that they’d one day return. The title ”Fear not, for you have sons in Europe” is a biblical pun that embodies that hope: a silent wish bestowed on those those who left for a better future. For even those who never returned: we may have left Bosnia, but has it ever left us?

By combining contemporary and infrared images with family archives, ”Fear Not, For You Have Sons in Europe” becomes not only a testimony to the reality of a Yugoslav diaspora, but a global question and call for empathy toward other diasporas, and cases of forced emigration throughout the world. In embracing the aftermath of decay, we might find our nourishment for rebirth: re-establishing the threshold of where we are, where we came from, and where we wish to go next.