Description
This paper focuses on the politics of curating ruin and repair at Vraca Memorial Park in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH). While the site has enjoyed status as a protected monument since 2005, the difficult, ambiguous memory of the site, alongside issues with investment, have led to a process of ruination. In recent years, Vraca Memorial Park has garnered significant scholarly interest, situated within elite ethno-national politics and contestation (Dougherty 2019) and read in terms of its entanglements between history, memory, and identity (Musi 2010). The site has also been at the centre of grassroots and state contestations over memory and memorialisation, particularly since the vandalism of Ženi Borac / Monument to a female fighter in 2013, and the subsequent activism at the site. Acknowledging the extent to which ‘acts of defacing, destroying, and removing works of public art intuitively acknowledge their symbolic capital’ (Doss 2018: 18), the paper examines contestations over the monument’s ruination and repair and its status within wider memory politics. Situating analysis between security and political geography interventions, the paper examines grassroot attempts to curate community (Douglas 2017) through everyday practices of clearing, cleaning, cultivating, and curating at the site. The paper brings to the fore the ways that (artist-) activists have sought to curate contested public space, assessing the extent to which art has been ‘successful’ in terms of remaking and reimagining forms of political community.
