Bombs cannot kill a city.
Sarajevo suffered the longest siege after WWII, and will soon celebrate 16 years of the signing of the Dayton agreement which put an end to a four years siege, and gave Bosnia and Herzegovina their independence.
Against the odds, the city is recovering and becoming a major center of culture and economic development in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Its infrastructure is partially reconstructed and one of the largest shopping malls in Europe has been built here.
By all estimates the city is recovering, but what about its youth, the generation that represents its future?
The siege gave birth to a generation that grew up overnight due to the horrors they lived during the war. These kids were 5 or 6 years old when the war started. They were to start school and instead they went to shelters. Schools became homes for refugees and staircase-schools emerged. Today they struggle to overcome this legacy, which seems to have left many young Sarajevans unemployed dwellers of the city’s coffee shops, bars and nightclubs. Are they struggling for a better future or have they sunk intoapathy and a sense of futility? Are these young people on their way to become mature political beings, real citizens ready to participate, to build a democratic society or have they been permanently tainted?
In a city that suffered so much, there is underlying tension, ready to explode any second and as soon as someone mentions the politically incorrect. What lies under the surface? Hatred? Fear? Hope?
Bosnia was the proof that people of different religions and confessions can live together. But after the war, is nationality an issue among youngsters? Do they perceive themselves as nothing but parts of the national being? Do they feel they are sentenced to it?
And what about religion? Although young Muslim Sarajevans are seen mostly by Muslims from other countries as alcohol drinking, club going and westernized, with many of the young women wearing revealing clothes, there is also a strong resurgence of Islamic faith. Do they want to be defined by religion?
What is the relation between the parents that suffered the war in first person, whose eyes get wet at the only mention of the War Tunnel, and their children who were too young to remember and often remember the war through their parent’s stories? Their parent’s lives are forever split in two, into “before” and “after”. “We’re fed up with all this war talk”, says Lejla, 22, “it’s like they don’t want us to move ahead.” Some of these youngsters cannot even recall the “before”. Will this forever be a part of them as human beings?
This project seeks to explore the aftermaths of the war on the young generation in Sarajevo. If war cannot kill a city, is it
instead a terrible disease, passed from generation to generation, difficult (or impossible?) to cure?
Martina Velenik & Italo Morales
http://www.overnightgeneration.com