They say there are threads that do not break when the fabric wears away. They remain somewhere among people. They pass from hand to hand, from one home to another, from one time into the next, waiting for someone to find them again.
I found one of those threads.
A golden one.
I carry it in the drapery wrapped around me, bearing traces of traditional Montenegrin women's dress, burgundy, green, and golden embroidery. A seam from the past, holding tightly together the threads of what lies ahead of me. And there, ahead of me, is a star. Bright. Unbound. My proof that somewhere there is still a direction, even when the path itself cannot yet be seen. It is my point of orientation.
I do not know which time I come from.
I may have lived before you.
Perhaps I am one of us.
Or perhaps I belong to a time that has yet to come. The fabric I wear still carries its zlatovez, the golden embroidery someone began long ago. Hands whose names we no longer know once drew golden thread through cloth, repeating ornaments, passing on knowledge, leaving traces behind them.
Generations changed. The thread remained. And somewhere between those threads, I hear Pekić: "Families have no future. Families have only a past."
I look at the golden thread between my fingers and think:
Perhaps that is true for as long as all we do is preserve the past. I will not leave mine behind glass. I will pull a thread from it and take it with me. Perhaps our Golden Fleece is no longer something to be searched for far away. Perhaps it has been here all along, in what we inherited, in the hands that embroidered before ours, and in the choice we make about what to do with that inheritance once it reaches us.
Now the thread is in my hands.
I draw it out of the fabric and let it escape the old ornament. And now it begins to move differently.
It finds new paths. It crosses. It tangles. It continues.
I say that what we inherit does not have to remain unchanged in order to remain ours.
I say that some things are preserved by keeping them as they are, while others survive only when we allow them to keep living.

The golden threads are connections between people who may not share the same names or the same language, who did not grow beneath the same roofs and do not carry the same stories with them. Each of us brings a thread of our own. None of them has to lose its color in order to cross another. Only when they meet can a new pattern begin. Somewhere among those lines lies a place where the past is no longer a burden I carry behind me, but material from which we can create, together, something that has never existed before.
That is where the future begins. And so I look towards my star. The same star can be seen from different places. People may stand far apart, beneath different roofs, among different mountains and borders, and still raise their eyes towards the same point in the sky.
That is why I guide my zlatovez towards it, so that, from the place I come from, it may show me just how far I can go.
I do not sever my bond with the past. I hold my golden thread firmly between my fingers.
I simply no longer weave it backwards. I weave it onward, boldly, towards the place where the future is only beginning.

Marija Šoln, Marg

For Šavnik
2026

Artworks in Šavnik