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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Method & Archive Organization

The image above depicts a draft version of our archive as a fold-out map. Our walk and the 31 interviewed trees are drawn sectionally along the long paper. Relevant archival photos, taken photos, stories told by residents of Sarajevo, article quotations, and video stills. This assemblage is proposed to be reformatted and presented in an atlas format, with the addition of the tree interview text and contextual drawings. The image below is a diagram of our working method, showing how the different parts of our process come together in a 'Tree Atlas of Sarajevo' (that we're currently working on).

Trees as Resource

Interview 24: Circle of Blue Spruce "We're standing inside the room made by five variants on coniferous pine trees. These are all young because they are hidden behind a large building. So, you have the triangle [of concealment to the] north of the building, and beyond this triangle's [area] are larger trees. The inside here is barren and the floor is made of pine needles. I wonder if people hang out here. I see a pigeon bone." Within Park Mirze i Davora there is one triangularly shaped area that would have been shielded from sniper view by neighbouring buildings. Today, most of the trees in this park are between 150-200 years old and were likely planted during Austro-Hungarian Times. However, there is one exception to that assessment: the five spruce trees within the triangle of protection. In the place of trees cut for firewood, these five spruce were planted in their stead during the war. See the article excerpt below. The Location: Park Mirz...

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 ...

Trees in Sarajevo

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