Skip to main content

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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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.
Post a Comment
Read more

Trees as Militarized Bodies

Interview 32: Wounded Lindens along the Miljacka "Trees exposed to open fire were spared as they were too dangerous to be logged. As a consequence of the shelling, they still bear traces from shrapnel and bullets. If a tree is wounded physically by the shelling it creates scar tissues around the wound or even around the piece inside it, similar to scar tissue that forms knobs and bulges. In protected places some trees were planted, presumably fruit trees for food, as well as fast-growing conifers for firewood."   From an interview with Sead Vojnikovic Location: Vilsonovo šetalište, Sarajevo 71000. The Heroes of Treca Gimnazijy: A war school in Sarajevo, 1992-1995: "Carrying all these nice memories from my school days in Treca Gimnazija, memories of endless laughs and the fun we had - playing soccer in the backyard, holding hands and strolling down Wilson Promenade with my high school sweetheart, I was deeply saddened and horrified when I f...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more