Inkquietude: Abandoned Dreams

Mirna Pavlovic has originally started “exploring” — as they like to say amongst theirselves — because she’s always wanted to be an archaeologist. Then, life took another turn but the love for archaeology never went away from her. Exploring abandoned places and ruins seemed like the next best thing, a way to pretend and daydream that she could still be an archaeologist. But not only that.

“I wanted to preserve the memory of the places as well as the families who once lived there, by documenting and retelling the hidden histories of these spatial and temporal incongruities that were once called home.”

The World Wars left many scars, and in terms of abandoned villas of wealthy families, most of them are concentrated in countries which held a precarious political position in the wars, as Mirna said. “Most of these homes were abandoned, appropriated by the regime and then reappropriated by the surviving members of the families after the conflict ended, only to once again be abandoned when the world entered post-war economic fluctuations. The crumbling economies and high emigration rates sealed their fate.”
⁣⁣
Originally from Croatia, Mirna is a completely self-taught photographer. She studied something completely unrelated — literature and linguistics — and got on the photography path really accidentally.⁣⁣ The single most important thing on her bucket list is visiting New Zealand — and then convincing her boyfriend to move there.⁣⁣