Post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina today is poisoned politically, economically, and environmentally. In his lecture, Damir Arsenijević will discuss how working with Bosnian cultural production, created at the intersection of art-activism-academia, challenges depoliticized positions on environmental violence. Three guiding questions are: How does art-activist production resist the ideological foreclosures of the expression of loss, destruction, and forgotten futures due to environmental violence? To what extent does such art-activist production open up access to public spaces, and engage citizens beyond gender, class, and generational divides, to articulate threats posed by the hidden and abandoned toxic waste as environmental violence? What potentially unique resources do these interventions offer to the sociality and politics of life in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina?

Professor Dr. Damir Arsenijević, University of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, is a cultural theorist and psychoanalyst in training, working at the intersection of academia, activism, and art. His research has focused on how international peacebuilding and transitional justice mechanisms have created political, social, and environmental waste ground out of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2019, he set up “Zemlja-Voda-Zrak” (www.zemljavodazrak.com), a platform for environmental humanities.

Kontakt

Jun-Prof. Dr. Željana Tunić, Leiterin der SOG-Zweigstelle Halle (Saale)
zeljana.tunic@slavistik.uni-halle.de