I was thinking about home and feeling nostalgic, which led me to create a sculptural form of an empty grandmother’s headscarf. I made two forms inspired by both of my grandmothers. My maternal grandmother was a classic "babushka" with a traditional Slavic headscarf, while my paternal grandmother wore a type of Muslim head covering. Both are now deceased, and I will never see them again. Therefore, this part of my culture, tradition, and history feels very distant and almost inaccessible to me. 

After creating these two "empty grandmother" heads, I received comments from people in various countries (e.g., Italy, Spain, the UK) who recognized similar headscarves worn by elderly women in their own cultures. This inspired me to create more figures. I began collecting different scarves, and the final work came to include many different "grandmothers" from various nations, cultures, and religions.

The process of collecting the scarves was also interesting in itself. Some I received from friends or colleagues; others I bought in shops, ordered online, or found at f lea markets in Frankfurt, Germany. Sometimes I felt I was buying not just an item, but a story. For instance, at a flea market, I bought a scarf that was "handmade in a local workshop by women under the bombs" — it had a "Sarajevo" sign on it. I bought another in a small local shop where the salesman spoke neither German nor English, and we communicated with gestures and simple words like "small", "big", "woman", "blue". Another scarf was a gift from a friend in Germany; his girlfriend brought it from Moscow. It had belonged to his grandmother.