Play in wartime schoolscapes

1992-1996, the city of Sarajevo is under siege and the children cannot attend school, play or move as freely as they would like. But scattered initiatives started to provide children with a basic need: schooling. A person, often a professor, will gather the children hiding in the basement of the building and some others from the vicinity and will organize a class. These initiatives will quickly build up into a local school system put in place by the Pedagogical Institute of the city to pursue schooling during the war and under the extreme conditions of siege that the city of Sarajevo was painfully undergoing.

Ratna Škola

RATNA ŠKOLA is a project researching the walking paths of professors to give class during the siege of Sarajevo between 1992-1995. Students weren’t attending the schools that were an easy target for belligerent parties and were gathering in variegated spaces of the city, called punkts (points), to meet with the teachers and attend class. Many teachers were[...]

My special journey in Sarajevo

The workshop “My special journey in Sarajevo” hosted by the War Childhood Museum (WCM) offered children, between 10 and 13 years old, a first approach to storytelling and mapping. Each child made his one zine of a one day journey in Sarajevo. After pointing out the places that appear in the story each child located them on[...]

Open up your box

A table with a view led the workshop “Open up your box” hosted by the War Childhood Museum (WCM) in Sarajevo. To elaborate this workshop, the WCM gave me access to 25 children’s testimonials from the archive, describing a particular aspect of their life during the war. The testimonials have a recurrent feature: There is an object[...]

Goga & Elmir

Last Monday I had a different walk in Sarajevo; this time it can be defined as “urban” in comparison with the previous walks on the surrounding hills, and “in company” instead of solitary. This walk was led by Goga and Elmir, a couple in love with the “other” Sarajevo, the one beyond the historic centre: Tito’s Sarajevo.