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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EVIDENCITY (Documenting Sarajevo: City and Society During and After the War)

Teaser

Summary

Evidencity research project taking Sarajevo as case study during its development had addresses the following issues:

1) How inhabitants living in the war city are documenting the war while making unique evidences of ruined buildings or newly necessary materials to survive, such as sniper protection walls, urban gardens, building of shelters, organization of cultural events.

2) Creation of map based digital archive that contains the citizensâ€™ photographs and other documents witnessing the war destruction of the city and citizensâ€™ reaction to it.

3) Relying on the citizensâ€™ documents as photographs and personal stories research project explored how city and surrounding territory can temporary serve as the war evidence and experimental space of its material production and reproduction by citizens living in the war city while creating â€˜non-violent spacesâ€™ of e.g. adaptation and protection that I defined as un-war space.

4) Methods and analysis of the architectures and the city in the war with aim to inform post-war design that includes the role of the architect during the war destruction and the post-war reconstruction.
The importance of the research project for the society living both in the war context and in the cities without war is to create multiple narratives about the war and include citizensâ€™ experiences in the academic research. In addition, it helps to create shared and collective memories of war because every human who experienced the war has his/her unique story about it as: how war started, how each person manage to survive and many other stories. Multiple narratives about the war in Sarajevo made by citizens and professionals as architects, journalists and photographers together are creating collective survival knowledge that can be compared to other survival knowledge in other war contexts such as recent war in Syria.

The overall objectives of the research project were:

(1) to include many narratives about the war in Sarajevo;

(2) to identify non-violent citizensâ€™ practices during the war relying on the urban spaces and architectures as the counter project to the military destruction and the wartime in Sarajevo.

(3) to propose methods and analysis of the war contexts that is different from the sensational images of journalist and of many war photographers.

Work performed

From the very beginning of the Evidencity project and following the proposed working packages, I did:
(1) training and education program at the TU Delft and MIT â€“ Comparative Media Studies during my secondment period;
(2) revisiting and critical analysis of the existing research project and architectural theory directly related to the war and post-war cities;
(3) organized public seminar in the New Institute in Rotterdam with: Prof. Tom Avermaete (my post-doc supervisor), Prof. Camillo Boano, Professor of Urban Design and Critical Theory at UCL in London and Dr. Pelin Tan, urban sociologist, artist and teacher in conflict studies;
(4) Performed numerous lectures as part of academic and non-academic conferences on the theme of citizens documenting of the war, survival practices, making of the on-line and open source archive;
(5) Published one book chapter on collective documenting and urban resilience, one journal article and two articles for on-line publication.
(6) Developed two cross-media exhibitions using research results and on-line archive: one for the Venice biennale of Architecture 2018 and one independent exhibition entitled â€˜un-war spaceâ€™; (
7) Relying on my research in Sarajevo, I started to research the citizensâ€™ life during the war in Mostar;
(8) Finally relying on my case studies and interest in introducing media and cultural studies in discipline of architecture, I created my own teaching courses and syllabus at the Faculty of Architecture â€“ TU Delft for master courses in Architecture.

Final results

Regarding the state of the art within the urban and architectural studies, the progress I made is related to the several outcomes: (1) creation of the new lexicon/dictionary entitled â€˜Un-war Lexiconâ€™ that contains explanation of the citizensâ€™ non-violent practices during the war and spatial reactions to the military violence; (2) production of the exhibition that is telling the story of the war in Sarajevo from the citizens point of view for the Venice biennale 2018 using the VR environment that integrates different representational tools: 3D modelling typical for architectural design, sound narrative of the war in Sarajevo, videos and photos that are more common for media studies and art exhibitions.
(3) Creation of the on-line archive entitled un-war space that can be upgraded and filled in with new documents in the future, so the research project Evidencity can continue relying on the created digital tools for the research and archiving.
(4) Production of the un-war space exhibition through the making of the independent exhibition device that is showing the archival materials from the on-line archive. The un-war device can also be reprogramed and continue to be used by me or other research projects in the future.

Last two component (3) and (4), related to the archiving of the war documents and showing these archive publicly is very relevant impact on the society. Both archive and exhibition device will help to continue documenting of the war and post-war cities and public discussion about the impact of the war apparatus to the contemporary socioeconomic picture of the world.