Curating Vraca Memorial Park: Activism, Counter-Memory, and Counter-Politics

Abstract

In 2005, officials designated Vraca Memorial Park in Sarajevo, Bosnia–Herzegovina, as a national monument. However, official disputes over responsibility for curating stalled progress on the site's restoration. In response, activists initiated two campaigns to save and restore Vraca: “Let's Save and Restore Vraca Memorial Park” and a campaign to restore the vandalized monument Ženi borac (woman fighter). Challenging the slide toward ruination, activist curators produced the site as a lively space of politics. Contributing to international political sociology scholarship on memory and its curation, the article develops the concept of activist curatorship through sustained engagement with activist practices of clearing, cleaning, and re-curating at the site between 2005 and 2020. Activist curation is an evolving and open-ended counter-memorial practice engaged by variously situated curators, both ordinary people and museum professionals. At Vraca, activist curating is held together through an alternative mnemonic community that mobilizes the legacy of anti-fascism, while curation is central to how activist interventions endure. Activist curators create space for political commentary on the past and open space for alternative forms of political community to proliferate, those which reach beyond the fragmentation of political, social, and memorial life in post-Dayton Bosnia–Herzegovina.