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On our research

Understanding Sarajevan trees and former war gardens as silent witnesses and as archives, we aim to tell/make visible/sensible the story of these species that became militarised bodies during the Siege of Sarajevo. We investigate the connections of interviewed trees with their specific relations to human stories and adjacent architecture in effort to understand the roles of trees as nonhuman, involuntary participants in war. Traces of the war are still visible today in the scarred tissue of trees that were wounded by ordnance and by the damage of a chainsaw stopped short by guilt. The narrative of the necessary felling of the urban forest is made more complex with the understanding that Sarajevo had a special relationship with trees before the war began. Azra Nuhefendic writes, “we had a cult of trees and forests. In the eighties, together with others, I was guarding the Miljacka bank in the night to prevent vandals from destroying freshly planted linden trees along the bank just to amuse themselves. We were growing up together with trees and we were dying together with them.”

76% of the Sarajevan trees were destroyed during the war. It is a strange realization that the most beautiful and full-grown trees of Sarajevo also mark the places that were most dangerous during the siege as they were unable to be safely cut. These places are marked by incongruent memories of violence, tension, and pre-war recreation. Sheltered places witnessed the total bodily loss - branches, trunk, and roots - of trees felled for firewood. Thus, depending on their location and age, the trees of Sarajevo may signify the most dangerous places in the besieged city, as well as convey the story of their use as protective shields and as a resource. 

We try to mediate our unavoidably human experience of the city and the species in it to tell an alternative story of the siege focused on the trans-species relationships of dependence, love, and exploitation. We’re looking at different methods to map, tell, overlay, narrate, the story of trees in Sarajevo from before the siege until now, without letting the anthropocentric gaze dominate.

references
Nuhefendić, Azra. “Stars have fallen”. Sarajevo… Imagining: the case of Sarajevo cable car. Edited by Armina Pilav and Asja Hafner, 13 May 2012. Imagining walk programme.

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