Homemade guns fashioned from pipes, watering cans made out of oil drums, a steampunk torch: objects cobbled together during the Bosnian war show Sarajevans' ingenuity in adversity.
by Justin McGuirk. The Historical Museum in Sarajevo has seen better days. It may occupy the city's finest modernist building, but the marble facade remains bullet-raked and the steps are crumbling. It only gets worse inside. In the main gallery, the ceiling is missing, the lights are off and so is the heating. It's so cold that I can see my own breath and there's a patch of ice on the floor where the roof has leaked. I am the only visitor. "People don't come here any more," says Amar Karabus, one of the curators. "They're not interested." The reason locals are not interested is that they would rather forget about the objects inside. The collection breezes over the thousand-year history of Sarajevo to concentrate on its four most notorious years: 1992-95. The exhibits tell the story of what daily life was like during the siege of the city in the Bosnian war. While those memories are still too raw for this show to be popular, the objects attest to the citizens' bottomless ingenuity and represent a design culture that has nothing to do with leisure, technological progress or social mobility but, rather, survival. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/mar/02/sarajevo-designs-survival-bosnian-war?CMP=twt_gu _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
