Trees as Militarized Bodies

Interview 21: Protective Plane Trees in Front of Government Office

"is this a plane? "Yeah." It is a plane. It has a kind of base, like it has been plopped on the ground, or its roots have been moving and pushing up. It has this knob on the northern side. It's so big that we can all just hold hands around it, the three of us. Speculations on why it remains: it is exposed, I think, to the observatory actually... maybe not. It also might serve as protection for the Roman-looking buildings behind us. It has a face on it - the tree is smiling. The tree is bigger than the building. This whole park is all plane trees; it's a Austro-Hungarian plantain. A ministry is behind it. "Vanjskih Poslova." Also known as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs"

Location: Park Mirze i Davora, Sarajevo 71000.

Sarajevo: City Under Siege (1994) BBC documentary

~35:00 militarized trees, “We didn’t know anything. We hid behind trees.”

Comments

Trees as Resource

Interview 26: Young Linden Along Terezija "Tree 26 is part of a group of young lindens that have been planted on the street where the Dom Mladih mall is situated [and which runs parallel to the Miljacka]. It is quite out in the open, so we were doubting why there [are] young trees here. And we think the answer is that there were containers placed here in the war and that gave [the citizens] enough shelter to cut down the [existing] trees for wood. To be investigated." Location: Terezija, Sarajevo 71000. Cropped image: FAMA, Survival Map, 1992-96.

Our Walk Through Sarajevo

Explore our walk in Sarajevo. We interviewed and photographed 31 trees along the way. The walk itself occured between the two main locations of our trip: the Balkan Han Hostel and History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The google map below contains the archive of our walk. The dark green dots indicate the trees that we 'interviewed'. The lighter green dots indicate places of urban gardening during the siege, that we visited now. If you click on the dots, archival and recent photos will show. The pink dots mark the places where we interviewed people: a woman collecting elderblossoms to make lemonade, for example, and forestry professor Sead, who showed us how to find 'scars' in the bark of the trees. Interviewing trees might seem a peculiar method: after all, trees can't speak. During the interviews, Nicole made a voice recording to note our observations and hypotheses about the stories this tree could tell. Jonas stood close to the tree, and made photo...