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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.”




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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 ...