Panel 1: Landscapes of Repair: Collaborative Approaches to the Creation of Space in Post-Traumatic Landscapes in Kosovo

13 July 2021 | 9.30 (CEST)

Facilitation: Alexander Vojvoda (forumZFD Kosovo)

Welcoming Words: Nehari Sharri (Country Director forumZFD Kosovo)

Abstract

forumZFD supports people involved in violent conflicts on the path to peace. The organisation was established in 1996 by peace and human rights groups – in reaction to the Balkan crisis – and has since then striven to help overcome war and violence. forumZFD is currently working with peace consultants in Germany, as well as eleven other countries in Europe, the Middle East and South East Asia. In Kosovo, forumZFD is present since year 2000 and has implemented projects supporting non- violent conflict transformation, contributing to peacebuilding and reconciliation. Since 2013, forum ZFD Kosovo is part of the western Balkans program (Bosnia and Hercegovina, Serbia, North Macedonia, and Kosovo) with the main fields of activity being Dealing with the Past and Peace Education. 


Keynote: Dr Amanda Crawley Jackson (Faculty Director of Knowledge Exchange and Impact, Arts & Humanities, University of Sheffield) & Zelda Hannay (University of Sheffield)

Abstract

Landscapes of Repair: “Stay a while with me…”

As James Joyce once remarked, ‘places remember events’. In this intervention, Amanda Crawley Jackson and Zelda Hannay will explore the ways in which the past inheres, visibly and invisibly, in landscapes beset by conflict and violence. 

they present different kinds of scoring – the score as an incision or wound, and a material register of woundedness, and the score as a script or series of marks to be worked from, interpreted or expressed. 

The scoring of the landscape (as an incision, or wound) is here considered as a re-considered as a musical score – a script, or a series of marks, to be worked from, rehearsed and cared for.  Their intervention interrogates how places scored by trauma are apprehended, experienced and represented in the present. Here, however, scoring is also considered as a script, or a series of marks to be worked from, rehearsed or cared for. Repair, in this context, is a time-based practice, which both demands and disrupts time.  The intervention explores the idea of pairings and repairings, 

We understand the encounter with a post-traumatic landscape as event, and ask what structures such an event – how do we read and interpret the landscape’s score, interpreting the marks we find there, reading them alongside the markings/scorings of our own bodies? In reading this score  

Zelda thoughts – 

-understanding the (present) experience of a post-traumatic landscape as an event, as something live.  

-thinking about the relationship between this event (my experience now of a post-traumatic landscape) and that event (the ‘original’ trauma)  

-what rituals, processes, interpretations and actions structure such an event? (When engaging in the rituals and processes of grief and trauma, which scripts or scores do we work from, how do our scripts change over time?) 

-from where do we take our cues for action, i.e. how do we read/interpret the score of the landscape? 

-Liveness is ‘unmarked’. Peggy Phelan (1993) states “The description itself does not reproduce the object, it rather helps to us to restage and restate the effort to remember what is lost. The descriptions remind us of how loss acquires meaning and generates


Respond: Bekim Ramku (Director KAF – Kosovo Architecture Festival)