Places of Public Utility

Name: Places of Public Utility
Brand: Sun Archive
Price: 30.0 EUR
Availability: InStock

Paweł Starzec

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Places of Public Utility is a book summarising more than a decade of documentary work done by Paweł Starzec in Bosnia and Herzegovina, focusing on mass atrocities of Bosnian War and the post-war fate of places where they were committed. The context of those seemingly ordinary places becomes impossible to envision, as clashing historical narratives about what happened become new revisions of history. The book combines images with direct quotations from judiciary documents concerning the events of the war, constructing an alternative narrative about what took place – events whose traces often remain deliberately hidden today, with no tangible remnants, commemorative plaques, or memorial rooms. There aren’t many monuments to the victims of this conflict. By common saying, it's the winners who write history.

Więcej

Those held captive, often residents of the immediate vicinity, encountered acts of cruelty, frequently at the hands of former acquaintances, neighbors, or people they recognized by sight. The degree of this cruelty varied depending on the place and time. After the war, in most cases, places used to keep, torture, rape and murder civilians were renovated, and thus restored to their former purpose of buildings of public utility. A very small number of them bear any form of acknowledgement about what happened.

History is a settlement within a community that establishes the way a community remembers past events. It serves an unprecedented role in organising and maintaining the state. Relying on history means creating an order of the present time, rooted in the past. A group of people with an identical perception of past events becomes bonded with collective consciousness. History is a collectively set narration, so it has the ability of being rewritten from scratch, to omit things that had to be forgotten. As it is written by Dr. Hikmet Karčić in his essay accompanying the book: “In January 2014, municipal authorities ordered the removal of the word “genocide” from the monument. Under heavy police supervision, workers altered the stone, erasing the term from the inscription. Officials justified the intervention by arguing that no court had legally determined that genocide had occurred in Višegrad and that the term was therefore inappropriate.”

The discussion about suffering becomes a discussion about technicalities. A vital part of events of Bosnian War of 1992-1995 is now concealed by new historical narrations to maintain the integrity of the newly founded society of divided ethnic groups. Although three decades have passed since those events, an analysis of this conflict – the processes behind it, its causes, and its aftermath – reveals that many of its elements are universal, beyond specific times and places. Consequently, they have the potential to recur, and indeed, since then, they have been repeated, continue to be repeated, and will likely be repeated again, only within different dates and in different locations.

+++ This publication was co-financed by Hasselblad Foundation 2025 Photo Book Grant +++

Texts are redacted quotations from Final Report of the Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992) – Annex VIII: Camps and ICTY indictments and other adjacent sources.