I Always Think of You and The Subject Does Not Merely Seek a Missing Object are two text-based works in which original writing is typed on cotton paper, which is then moulded  within pigmented beeswax and dammar. These materials preserve the texts while simultaneously obscuring them, leaving words and sentences at different thresholds of visibility. Language becomes both inscription and material trace: something that can be encountered but never apprehended in its entirety.

The works approach longing through two distinct modes of writing. One moves through a lyrical and associative register – a kitchen table, biscuits, mothers, repeated departures, language, and a billboard stretched across the Genex Tower in Belgrade. The other adopts the register of a psychoanalytic essay, beginning with Heimweh^* and Fernweh^* to consider how the object of longing may change while the ache itself persists. Yet the distinction between these registers is deliberately unsettled. I Always Think of You, a line taken from the lyrical text, becomes the title of the psychoanalytic essay; The Subject Does Not Merely Seek a Missing Object, taken from the analytical text, becomes the title of the lyrical one. Each work is thus named by language that belongs to the other.

This crossing unsettles any stable division between affect and analysis, experience and abstraction. Neither text simply explains the other. Enclosed within the same material process, each carries a trace of the other while remaining partially inaccessible itself. Meaning emerges between the works: across what is written and obscured, felt and thought, remembered and theorised. Longing becomes not an object represented by either text, but a relation that passes between them.

*Heimweh: homesickness
*Fernweh: the ache for the faraway

Photo: Studio Lesutis & Miljević