Jessie Fyfe (Phd student in Architecture)
‘Legacies of witness testimony on physical and memorial landscapes in Croatia’
Culture is embedded in the city, in its interior spaces, which is also inhabited by tradition, group affinity, religion and faith and finds its origins in the near invisibility of layered memories. Cities are also the primary locus for ethno-national and religious conflicts and as such suffer as distinct targets for group-based hostilities. Within the discourses on the legacy of conflict and violence in the Former Yugoslav Republic cities like Mostar, Vukovar and Sarajevo have understandably been the focus of much research on the dynamics of conflict, memory and the built environment. The paper will propose an expansion of this focus on the urban social and cultural memory-scapes to consider the relationship between the violence of deliberate attacks on the urban fabric and the violence and its legacy on the cultural value and memory of landscape.
Unlike architecture and the built environment that has an ‘archetypal collective memory’, one that is tangible, monolithic and permanent, landscape is perceived to have the capacity to endure and renew itself and thereby subject to being a site of more intangible memories. Landscape has a special temporal condition, that of the cyclical nature of growth and adaptation, that affords it its perceived primordial status, but this characterization can be seen as a kind of violence itself as these natural processes can physically conceal, alter and suppress evidence of conflict and trauma. Unlike architectural targets of destruction, where the destruction itself often endows buildings with historical significance, violence against the landscape affects cultural practice differently. What is communicated in the destruction of landscape is bound to its capability to efface, weather, and deteriorate as well as renew and regenerate a site.
The paper will propose that the tensions in the materiality, spatiality and temporality of landscape found in the ICTY witness testimony impacts everyday life following the historical violence and contemporary conflicts in Croatia. The paper intends to reveal how the land is appropriated by a variety of actors, parties and institutions to serve as a complex of territories and jurisdictions and also enlisted to play the role of witness, of memorist, and at times to be the site of forgetting.
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