Photographic testimony to the destruction of Sarajevo

The exhibition aimed to document, objectively and without pity, the destruction that has occurred in the city of Sarajevo since the war descended on its streets, thus denouncing the belligerents’ attempt to annihilate the cultural and historical heritage of a people.
The essentially photographic material was collected in four groups corresponding to four historical periods: the Muslim period, the Austro-Hungarian period, from 1918 to 1945 and from 1945 to the present.
The exhibition was not only a denunciation, but rather an opportunity to meet Yugoslav architects who followed the exhibition with the intention of contacting public and private entities that could help them, at the end of the conflict, in the reconstruction of the city.

Project initiative: Association of Architects DAS-SABIH Sarajevo
Curators: Midhat Cesovic, Borislav Curic, Nazif Hasanbegovic, Darko Sefic,
Sabahudein Spilja.
Promoters and coordinators of the Milan edition: Opos, Tamara Molinari, Luco Molinari, Giampiero Bosoni.

Inauguration 25 November 1994
Participants: Prof. Giovanni Curatola orientalist, Giancarlo De Carlo architect, Maurice Cerasi architect, Giovanni Vragnaz architect, Gabriele Basilico architect and photographer
Coordination: Luca Molinari

From the room sheet
‘Those who spend the night in bed in Sarajevo can hear the voices of its darkness.
Heavily and inexorably beats the hour on the Catholic cathedral: two past midnight. More than a minute passes (exactly, I counted, seventy-five seconds) and only then does the clock of the Orthodox church announce itself, with a weaker but sharp sound, that it too is beating its two hours. Shortly afterwards, the clock tower of the Bey Mosque is heard with a raucous and distant sound, striking eleven, eleven hours of the Turkish spirits, according to a strange calculation of distant and foreign worlds. The Jews have no clock of their own that strikes the hours, the wicked God is the only one who knows what time it is at that moment by them, how many according to Sephardic calculation, how many according to Ashkenazi calculation. So also at night, while all sleeps, in the counting of the empty hours of time, watches over the difference that divides
this slumbering people, who give, arouse, rejoice and suffer, who feed or fast according to the four different, mutually hostile calendars, and who address all their prayers to the same heaven in four different church languages. And this difference, sometimes visibly and openly, sometimes subtly and insidiously, is always akin to hatred, with which it is often identified’.

This is what Ivo Andric, Nobel Prize winner for literature, wrote in 1920. This is the excerpt from a letter that a friend sent to the writer, explaining the reasons for his escape from Bosnia. ‘Yes, Bosnia is the land of hatred’. So what?
To accept a ‘genetic’ fact as saying that Italy is the country of transformism, that Russia is the country of passivity and that America is the country of aggression? No.
The Bosnian Serb architects who worked on this initiative, worked in hunger and cold, unable to communicate with the outside world; they set off across half of Europe, asking for hospitality for their images, as painful as they are chaste. These smoking buildings, these black holes in the façades and roofs, even in the poverty of the photographic image, testify to the horror, the heavy silence that follows a bombing, the extreme disfigurement to which human beings can reach: destroying their history.
To reknit, instead, the threads of history, to rebuild: this is the meaning of this small initiative, which we, here and now, can do.

Evening meeting
1 December 1994
debate evening: ‘Sarajevo between reconstruction of the physical space and reconstruction of the violated soul’.