Panel 4: Landscapes of Repair: Disruptive landscapes and war trauma within bodies, lands, rivers and film

Speakers

Armina Pilav (Un-war Space Lab/University Sheffield)

Ognjen Glavonić (film director, screenwriter, producer)

Abstract: Disruptive landscapes and war trauma within bodies, lands, rivers and film

 Armina Pilav in conversation with Ognjen Glavonić will explore spatial, ecological, political and material formations of war, post-war landscape systems of trauma. They will investigate how human bodies, land, rivers as well as documenting tools such as photography or film cameras through their operators are recording, remembering, remaking and representing war violence and traumatic experiences. Armina will introduce the landscapes of change, by military destruction and citizen’s survival strategies during the siege of Sarajevo and in-urban war in Mostar between 1992-1996. This exploration will be used as a base to understand politics of creation of the filmic landscapes of trauma in Ognjen film Depth II. The intention is to understand if images in the film have capacity to reconstruct the times of the war event and how then these images operate in the public domain. How the dichotomy of “before and after the war”, very common and linear practice of narrating and representing the war events, body, spaces of violence is subject to change or even erasure. Involving different agents and environments, the traumatic experiences are creating hybrid spaces, flowing archives as are river Drina and Neretva, site-specific symbiosis of organic and anorganic materials, disruptive landscapes through negative aesthetics of material traces and raw beauty made of war trauma.