IZMEDJU NAS / BETWEEN US

An Open Archive Initiative

Founding text by Nihad Kresevljakovic, Clarissa Thieme & Jasmina Gavrankapetanovic, Sarajevo/Berlin 2015

20 years after the peace agreement of Dayton, the „Library Hamdija Kresevljakovic – Video Arhiv“ in Sarajevo opens up to a pan-European discourse.

IZMEDJU NAS / BETWEEN US aims to invite scholars, artists, and the public to work with the Library Hamdija Kresevljakovic Video Arhiv. The Archive, established during the siege of Sarajevo (1992-1996), contains video testimonies filmed by the locked-in citizens. The project proposes to create a digital and physical public space beyond the local context and a critical platform where memories and people’s multiple perspectives are opened up, shared, and discussed. The project aims to democratize archiving memories and engage with people’s shared stories.

Traditionally, archives are connected to official institutions, and they gather historical documents preserved for the sake of future generations. But in the case of the Library Hamdija Kresevljakovic Video Arhiv, we are dealing with a community-driven project that, at its core, never aimed to be objective but instead focused on individual perspectives. The archive's founding was an emancipatory attempt to critically question the stereotypes of Sarajevo and its citizens in the international media coverage of the war in Bosnia Herzegovina.

Today, 20 years after the war that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia, most of the archive’s material is disconnected from the collective that created it and the circumstances it was produced in. Nevertheless, this rich diversity of personal memories needs to be reconsidered. The archive needs to open beyond its local/regional context and find its place in a European space between individual and collective perspectives of the shared past, present, and future.

By inviting people from different sectors (arts & culture, education & academic research), diverse viewpoints will be brought into the project: artists, curators, and scholars from Bosnia, former Yugoslavia, and abroad. IZMEDJU NAS / BETWEEN US aims to create a platform of critical inquiry that brings this research back to the regional and European public through lectures, exhibitions, and panels. And last but not least, by prospectively ensuring that the public has access to the archive by digitizing the video testimonies that are often on the verge of decay.

The Video Archive H. Kresevljakovic is, in that sense, a chance to look in open and diverse ways at recent European history and to start various dialogues publicly. We strongly believe that this will strengthen public space, as we understand it as a field of democratic discourses not only in Bosnia Herzegovina and the Balkans and Europe in general.

In 2014 Bosnia Herzegovina was again in international media with familiar yet different pictures. All over the country, demonstrations were taking place. What started as a singular protest of desperate workers facing unbearable social living conditions in Tuzla expanded. In a short time, an overwhelming number of citizens were marching against a corrupt political landscape that causes stagnation and poverty.

The very striking aspect of these protests was their lack of ethnic mapping. A fact that is an absolute novelty in post-war Bosnia since war is usually presented as ethnically driven. Another striking aspect was that politicians seem absent from it and new political players coming out of the citizenship organized themselves in basic democratic structures. This very fragile yet promising movement was vanishing again, and nationalist-driven nepotism shows off stronger than before in Bosnia Herzegovina in the middle of Europe, which is unsettled by questions of social justice, democratic participation, and nationalism growing stronger.

In times of change and uncertainties, one can witness the tendency of societies to assure themselves on historical grounds. The described numerous social and historical processes raise the questions of how we deal with our history and our archives: if we open them up to diverse perspectives to make them a public space of encounter, or if we close them and make them the ground of excluding identity concepts.

We truly believe that also against the political background of current Bosnia Herzegovina, the region of Ex-Yugoslavia, and Europe in general, IZMEDJU NAS / BETWEEN US is significant in both a Bosnian and European context. Consequently, it is not only an artistic and curatorial inquiry of the Video Archive Hamdija Kresevljakovic and its video testimonies of the Bosnian war; IZMEDJU NAS / BETWEEN US is primarily a platform for cross-sectoral discussion of the place and role of private memories and the traces of these memories in a wider public context.

Inviting artists and scholars to work with the Video Archive will generate new connections, collaborations, and interpretations: it will disclose an archive’s multiple voices. The project aims to present the results of different research to the European public and to open up room for public discussion, encouraging the democratization of discourses. Open sessions will accompany different project phases, share work in progress and invite the public to join these processes actively. We aim to create a community discourse by opening the archive to participants and including a wider public to democratize the archive.

Our collaborators, coming from art, cultural or social fields, have in common that they are highly engaged in building up cultural platforms that encourage democratizing discourses.

IZMEDJU NAS / BETWEEN US