BHS / ENG
From Sarajevo to Strasbourg
10th Memory Lab Study Trip /Workshop: A Laboratory for a European Memory Space?
Alsace-Lorraine, 3 - 10 September, 2023
Interest for this area is manifold and comes both from personal motivation and professional interest. My family history directed me a great deal towards this area of research, and decision to move from Belgrade to Sarajevo only intensified importance and inevitability of these topics in my life. Study of Anthropology and Ethnology only contributed to level of interest for ways in which certain communities and smaller groups (families) create narratives about own past. Finally, love for history and politics added a crucial “spice” and made me see personal engagement in this area as political and necessary one.
In cooperation with the Goethe Institute and the French Institute in Zagreb, Youth Initiative for Human Rights - Croatia (YIHR) organised in the town of Petrinja (central Croatia) a symposium "Remembrance of the Civil Victims of War". Petrinja, as the town that suffered during the 1990s war in Croatia, was chosen as the venue of the symposium - aiming to present memorialisation of civil victims of war practices in Germany, France and Croatia - with the wish to further discuss the initiative for opening a museum dedicated to the civil victims of war in the town.
The Berlin Wall Memorial is the central memorial site of German division, located in the middle of the capital. The memorial contains the last piece of Berlin Wall with the preserved grounds behind it and is thus able to convey an impression of how the border fortifications developed until the end of the 1980s. The Memorial extends along both sides of the Bernauer Strasse: on the border strip that had been located in East Berlin, an open-air exhibition uses the Bernauer Strasse to explain the history of division; the memorial also includes the Monument in Memory of the Divided City and the Victims of Communist Tyranny and the Window of Remembrance.
Documentary Film: "What kind of memorials do we want to build?" / "Kakve memorijale želimo da gradimo?" Documentary filmmaker Ćazim Dervišević made a documentary film on 2011 Memory Lab workshop and studytrip (in which he participated), which took place in Prijedor (BiH) with trips to Vukovar, Jasenovac (Croatia) and Donja Gradina (BiH).