SARAJEVO WARSCAPES:
THE CITY AND THE POLITICS OF ETHNIC NATIONALISM
Mirjana Ristic
Thursday 26 July, 7.00pm
Words@building50, RMIT building 50, Orr Street Carlton
Since the beginning of the 1990s, after a long history of multiculturalism, Bosnia and Herzegovina suffered a resurgence of ethnic nationalism resulting in a violent civil war. This presentation will discuss the architectural and urban dimensions of such conflict focusing on the case of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. It will discuss the destruction of built form and urban space during the war of 1992-5, and reconstruction, re-inscription and memorialization after the war (1996-2010).
The discussion will show that transformations of Sarajevo’s architecture and urban space were not only the result of the ethnic conflict, but operated as the very means through which the conflict was mediated. The wartime violence operated as an attack upon architectural symbols and urban places of ethnic mix, rather than any particular ethnic identity. The post-war reconstruction shows that the conflict shifted to the production of ethnic symbolism through re-inscription and memorialization.
BIOGRAPHY
Mirjana Ristic graduated at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade, Serbia in 2005. She practiced architecture and engaged in research in the area of urban design at the Research and Business Centre of the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade, from 2005 to 2006. She received her PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2011. She has taught urban design and theory at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning.
