Abstract
This chapter is interested in the tension between lived silences in the post-war everyday and public commemoration. The concept of ‘presence of absence’ is developed in order to capture the complex ways that the traumatic past is embedded in the present. Silence is understood as an articulation of this presence of absence and the chapter explores silence as a practice and performance in the everyday of post-war Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The chapter reflects upon how such everyday silent memory work can be represented through public commemoration. It looks to the importance of art as an alternative realm that does not necessarily strive for closure through speech, but rather embraces a state of suspension. Aesthetic representations of presence of absence may be, the chapter concludes, a powerful means to articulate everyday memory work of silence.
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Notes
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The chapter partly builds upon fieldwork conducted in 2017–2018 for the research project Peace and the Politics of Memory, funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences.
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The project was organised in cooperation between the City of Sarajevo and East West Theatre Company, a non-profit cultural institution established in Sarajevo in 2005.
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Mannergren Selimovic, J. (2021). Articulating Presence of Absence: Everyday Memory and the Performance of Silence in Sarajevo. In: Otele, O., Gandolfo, L., Galai, Y. (eds) Post-Conflict Memorialization. Memory Politics and Transitional Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54887-2_2
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