Reading Sarajevo City

In this essay, introducing a new volume considering Sarajevo as a ‘multiplex city’ – ceaselessly active and perpetually changing, rooted in the existence of a multidimensional and collaborative system composed of separate projects – the author scrutinises Sarajevo’s urban space from diverse standpoints inspired by architecture, urbanism, literature, art, anthropology, history, philosophy, social sciences and politics. In the process, he draws expressly on Sarajevo’s history allowing people to be one with another. Here examining graffiti and outdoor wall art, which not only structure the urban space but facilitate the city to speak to and of itself, the author demonstrates how outdoor art, and walls, operates additionally as an agent of power to mediate resistance and to contest, subvert and negate violence. In the process, he addresses how ‘being with’ – co-existence, exposure to each other and hybridisation – is translated into the permanent metamorphosis of a city bonding its past and its future and, in so doing, healing the tragedies, suffering and failures of humanity of its recent past.