Delta Oscar Mike

Delta Oscar Mike charts my two-month voyage on a cargo ship along the shores of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and West Africa. It was a chance to understand – and redefine my relationship to – my family’s seafaring heritage, and at the same time, an opportunity to carve out a place of my own within a male-dominated environment. As the only woman among the crew, my work offers new and personal perspectives on the lives of the seafarers, combining photographs of everyday life at sea with intimate memoirs. When decoded from NATO’s phonetic alphabet – used on ships to communicate more effectively, – the seemingly unrelated words "Delta, Oscar, Mike" spell out DOM, which is the Croatian word for “home”. The complexity of the relationship between ship and home is reflected in contrasting motifs of a maritime landscape and the interior of a cargo ship. In the form of an anti-logbook, fragments of everyday life join contradictory representations of the ship as both an intimate and a mundane space. 

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