Abstract
In this chapter, we, as an anthropologist and a visual artist, discuss the role of the artistic, imaginative, and creative in the documentary, ethnographic, and scholarly—and vice versa—and how the fusion of the different disciplinary approaches can inform and enrich research methods in memory studies. Through our collaborative open-ended method, we challenge the boundaries between the notions of subjective and objective, ethics and aesthetics, individual and collective, local and global, and past and present. Our travelling global exhibition ‘Places of Pain’—inspired by the Bosnian genocide and made of photographs, text, documents, graphics, drawings, sound, and video—calls for the recognition of resilience of ordinary people and the acknowledgement of ‘ordinariness’ and individuality of those who have posthumously been put into collective categories, mass graves and war statistics, or elevated to the abstract status of the nation’s martyrs.
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- 1.
The fictional event Andrić described in his novel actually names Radisav’s executioner as Merdžan, a Gypsy serving with the Ottoman troops—not a Turk or a Bosnian Muslim. Radisav gets punished for sabotaging works on building the bridge over Drina in Višegrad. He suffers painful death by impalement. Andrić’s description of the impalement has been regarded as the most graphically described act of violence in modern Yugoslav literature. Cf. Andrić 2003, pp. 43–50.
- 2.
The original BBC footage of the 1993 event is available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcCFJAfLTJE.
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Halilovich, H., Fejzić, A.E. (2019). The Art of Memory After Genocide: Reimagining the Images of the Places of Pain and (Be)longing. In: Drozdzewski, D., Birdsall, C. (eds) Doing Memory Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1411-7_5
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