DO YOU REMEMBER SARAJEVO – MULTITUDE

Nihad Kreševljaković & Clarissa Thieme

Installation with 3 video-monitors, 3 x Raspberry PIs with random generator, archival video footage

In collaboration with Sead Kreševljaković, Nedim Alikadić & Zlatan Prohić

SJEĆAŠ LI SE SARAJEVA – MULTITUDE is an experimental spatial set up to let the Library Hamdija Kreševljaković Video Arhiv Sarajevo speak for itself. The Video Arhiv is a private collection of amateur videos filmed by a group of friends around the siblings Kreševljaković and Nedim Alikadić 1992 - 1995 in besieged Sarajevo. From the start the Video Arhiv was community driven and collected a diversity of individual perspectives. Recurring viewings, in which videos randomly picked were watched and discussed together were as important as filming and collecting the footage.

SJEĆAŠ LI SE SARAJEVA – MULTITUDE translates this archival forum to the gallery space and invites visitors to encounter the raw material of the Video Arhiv in a spatial arrangement themselves. There are three different types of material characterizing the collection: amateur documentaries, local broadcast, and artistic films. A random generator constantly selects videos by chance and yet out of these specific material pools ensuring that the different kind of archival footage is always parallelly shown on three monitors. A reset button allows visitors to re-start the selection process at any time wanted.

 Thirty years after the beginning of the Bosnian War, the material of the Library Hamdija Kreševljaković Video Arhiv has outgrown its authorship and taken on a life of its own. New political urgencies arise from questions of self-representation, historical revisionism and the relativization of violence not only in the region of former Yugoslavia but also beyond. As archives are once more ideologically contested sites of interpretive sovereignty and control over their material SJEĆAŠ LI SE SARAJEVA – MULTITUDE follows the core idea of the Video Arhiv to create a space for an open, unguided encounter with its material hoping to nourish new possibilities to connect with it.

Depicting everyday life under siege the footage of the Video Arhiv is ordinary, impressive, boring, funny, depressing, calming, confusing, enlightening, lulling - disparate and subjective in every respect, spontaneous, shot from the gut, in which the camera is more sensory organ than apparatus, and persistently tries to create space for dialogue although or precisely because of being under attack.

SJEĆAŠ LI SE SARAJEVA – MULTITUDE is part of the ongoing initiative IZMEĐU NAS I BETWEEN US by Nihad Kreševljaković and Clarissa Thieme, which invites a broader public to encounter and engage with the archival footage of the Library Hamdija Kreševljaković Video Arhiv Sarajevo. 

Archival Video Footage (c) Library Hamdija Kreševljaković Video Arhiv Sarajevo