Project Origins

Brendan Jackson recalls the origin of the project – an event held in Sarajevo and Mostar, Bosnia Herzegovina, in 2006.

The image above shows Vijecnica in Sarajevo, where Bosnia’s National and University Library was housed. The library held an estimated 1.5 million volumes, among them 155,000 rare books, unique archival collections, 478 manuscripts, the national collection of record of all the books, newspapers and magazines published in Bosnia since the 19th century, books published abroad about Bosnia’s history and culture, as well as the central research collections of the University of Sarajevo. In diverse languages from Persian to Arabic to Croatian, the multi-ethnic history of Sarajevo and Yugoslavia had been carefully catalogued and stored on the shelves. In August 1992 it was bombarded with incendiaries from Serbian nationalist positions across the river. The library burned for three days and the building was completely gutted, with more than 90% of its irreplaceable contents reduced to ashes. The result is what a Council of Europe report called “a cultural catastrophe.”

Dr. Kemal Bakarsic, librarian of Bosnia’s National Museum, described the burning of Library as thus: “All over the city sheets of burned paper, fragile pages of gray ashes, floated down like a dirty black snow. Catching a page you could feel its heat, and for a moment read a fragment of text in a strange kind of black and gray negative, until, as the heat dissipated, the page melted to dust in your hand.”

In a process of slow restoration, today the building is little more than an empty shell. The burning of books and the destruction of cultural artefacts and symbols represent the failure of dialogue. The opening event of the New Agora Symposium in 2006, organised by the Borderland Foundation, was held in Vijecnica with keynote addresses from Dr Mustafa Ceric, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Leonard Swidler, Professor of Catholic Thought and Inter-religious Dialogue at Temple University, New York.

The Symposium brought together a diverse group of cultural practitioners, artists, writers, workers in community development and conflict resolution, journalists and media workers. It was from this gathering that a group emerged to work together on this intercultural dialogue project and develop these laboratories of cross-cultural practice.

Brendan Jackson is an artist working with Laundry
www.brendanjackson.co.uk