The Stuff from the Siege: Transitional Justice and the Power of Everyday Objects in Museums
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International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2022, 16, 1–15
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijac002
Article
The Stuff from the Siege: Transitional
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Justice and the Power of Everyday Objects
in Museums
Johanna Mannergren Selimovic*
A B S T R A C T∞
This article explores the role of the affective power of everyday objects in commemorations of war and
conflict. It seeks to understand the transformative power of the everyday as a memory node and investi-
gates how and why everyday objects can become carriers of an inclusive rendering of the past. Through
a phenomenologically grounded reading of two exhibitions on the 1992–1995 siege of the Bosnian
capital Sarajevo, the article theoretically advances the idea that everyday objects that are transformed
into artefacts in museums expand our moral, mnemonic imagination and therefore potentially con-
tribute to peace. A systematic analysis of the affective power of everyday objects is developed through
three key conceptual lenses – authenticity, intimacy and vulnerability. The study thus contributes to
research on the postwar museum as a site for transitional justice and peacebuilding, and the role of
material things as carriers of emotions and meaning in the context of postwar memorialization.
KEYWORDS: Bosnia-Herzegovina, embodied methodology, memory, museums, peacebuilding
IN TRODUCTION
A child’s blue knitted sweater, a half-finished letter and a dented humanitarian tin can are some of
the things that are discussed in this article. I encountered these ordinary objects at two Sarajevo
museum exhibitions, both dealing with the 1992–1995 siege of the Bosnian capital. They moved
me deeply. I was overcome by their powerful transmission of what it was like to live through the
longest siege of a capital in European modern history, during which more than 10,000 people
were killed by relentless sniper fire and shelling and more than 56,000 people were wounded,
including nearly 15,000 children.1 I experienced what Tolia-Kelly et al. call a ‘visceral shudder’
* Associate Professor, School of Social Sciences, Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. Email:
johanna.mannergren.selimovic@sh.se; Associated Senior Researcher, The Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Stock-
holm, Sweden.
∞ This research was made possible through funding from The Swedish Research Council, grant numer 2016-01460
and from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ), grant number P16-0249:1.
1 Cherif M. Bassiouni, ‘Study of the Battle and Siege of Sarajevo 1/10’ (United Nations), https://web.archive.org/web/200
10222115037/http:/www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/VI-01.htm (accessed 22 February 2001).
© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in
any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com2 • J. Mannergren Selimovic
as the objects seemed full of vitality.2 Departing from these encounters with ‘the stuff from the
siege,’ I seek to understand the transformative power of the everyday as a memory node. I explore
the role of the affective power of the cultural heritage generated from the everyday of war and
argue that these ‘difficult objects’ can become vehicles for an inclusive, pluralist rendering of
the past. The War Childhood Museum and the exhibition ‘Sarajevo under Siege’ at the History
Museum are highly relevant for this exploration as they focus on displaying objects rather than
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textual presentations and aim to transmit the corporeal experiences of living through the war. As
such they are two key sites for remembering the siege in the lived, uneasy peace of the present.
I show how the museums in question use the everyday objects to counteract and present an alter-
native to remembrance practices that tend to increasingly marginalize inclusivity and plurality
in the memoryscape.
From these observations I seek to theoretically advance an understanding of how everyday
objects transformed into artefacts in museums can contribute to a more inclusive and pluralist
peace. I discuss how the ‘everydayness’ of these objects makes them into such poignant carriers
of ambivalence and emotional complexity, which in turn opens up for the moral, mnemonic
imagination needed for peace.3 Three conceptual lenses are proposed as key to understanding
the strange power of the everyday object – authenticity, intimacy and vulnerability.
This reading is of relevance for transitional justice, as it resonates with some central themes in
research regarding societies transitioning from conflict. First, we know that the memory politics
that play out in postconflict societies carry immense power to affect the future. This process has
come to the fore in transitional justice studies as commemoration activities and spaces such as
museums are increasingly understood as part of the transitional justice realm. The development
of various commemorative sites and institutions is suggested as part of reparation measures,
and commemorative activities are seen as important and meaningful in order to fulfil the need
for acknowledgement among survivors, as well as sensitize citizens in general to the pain and
suffering of victims, thereby avoiding a repetition of atrocities.4
Second, the role of materiality is increasingly attended to in research on transitions from war.
Transitional justice research is brought into dialogue with theories of affect and the role of mate-
rial things as carriers of emotions and meaning in the context of memorialization.5 Objects used
in commemorative activities hold specific power, it is argued. As they transfer from being an
ordinary thing to an artefact on display new layers of meaning are added, transforming ‘collected
memories’ to collective memory.6
Third and importantly, the everyday has emerged as an important realm for the making (and
breaking) of peace. For a long time largely overlooked in studies in peace and conflict research,
transitional justice and the field of international relations more broadly, it is now in research
and practice increasingly acknowledged that mundane and routine encounters and practices
2 Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, Emma Waterton and Steve Watson, Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures
(London: Routledge, 2018), 22.
3 John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
4 E.g., Louis Bickford, ‘MemoryWorks/Memory Works,’ in Transitional Justice, Culture, and Society: Beyond Outreach, ed. Clara
Ramírez-Barat (New York: International Center for Transitional Justice and Social Science Research Council, 2014): 490–527;
Brandon Hamber, ‘Conflict Museums, Nostalgia, and Dreaming of Never Again,’ Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology
18(3) (2012): 268–281; Elizabeth Jelin, ‘Public Memorialization in Perspective: Truth, Justice and Memory of Past Repression in
the Southern Cone of South America,’ International Journal of Transitional Justice 1(1) (2007): 138–156.
5 Cynthia E. Milton and Anne-Marie Reynaud, ‘Archives, Museums and Sacred Storage: Dealing with the Afterlife of the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission of Canada,’ International Journal of Transitional Justice 13(3) (2019): 524–545; Jason Dittmer and
Emma Waterton, ‘Affecting the Body: Cultures of Militarism at the Australian War Memorial,’ in Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Pol-
itics, Practices and Infrastructures, ed. Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, Emma Waterton and Steve Watson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 2;
Sandra Dudley, Amy J. Barnes, Jennifer Binnie, Julia Petrov and Jennifer Walklate, eds., The Thing about Museums: Objects and Expe-
rience, Representation and Contestation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017): 47–74; Sara McDowell and Máire Braniff, Commemoration as
Conflict: Space, Memory and Identity in Peace Processes (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Tolia-Kelly, Waterton and Watson,
supra n 2 at 2.
6 Jeffrey K. Olick, ‘Collective Memory: The Two Cultures,’ Sociological Theory 17(3) (1999): 333–348.The Stuff from the Siege • 3
in the everyday make up a complex web of relations that is highly productive of politics and
peace.7
Yet little attention in the literature on transitional justice has been afforded to the remembering
of the everyday in the aftermath of war as a site of particular relevance for peacebuilding. Despite
the importance of the everyday for human relations there has been limited effort to systemati-
cally investigate whether and how memorialization of the more vernacular experiences of living
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in and with war can contribute to the construction of peace, as research tends to focus more on
how military aspects of war are commemorated. In general, the ‘heritage of peace’ – including
everyday resilience and resistance to violence – is far less curated and displayed than the her-
itage of war, as Walters et al. eloquently show in their overview of heritage and peacebuilding.8
Hence, it emerges that while peace research and transitional justice research have engaged with
the meaning and importance of the politics of the everyday in the postwar, as well as with the
role of memorialization as part of transitional justice, this interest has to a much lesser degree
been translated into studies that take a specific interest in how and why the everyday is com-
memorated (or not) and remembered (or forgotten) in ways that can assist in transitions from
war to peace.
This article seeks to bridge this disconnect by lacing together the above emerging themes
into a conceptual and experiential analysis of the particular role of everyday objects in museums
that seek to tell inclusive narratives and contribute to peace. It takes an interest in how ordinary
people lived their lives during war and the material legacy of this life; a legacy that often seems
to be just ‘stuff,’ no different from the rest of the material clutter that human lives accumulate.
Yet when these things are put on display they are transformed into artefacts and the lived civilian
experience is given significance.9
The article connects this affective power of the complex ‘everydayness’ of objects with the
work of peace and reconciliation scholar Paul Lederach, who suggests that transformation to
sustainable peace is dependent on our ‘moral imagination,’ meaning ‘the capacity to imagine
something rooted in the challenges of the real world yet capable of giving birth to that which
does not yet exist.’10 Lederach thinks that without moral imagination, there is no hope for
transformation. His concept is fleshed out and combined with Keightely and Pickering’s idea
of ‘mnemonic imagination’ that articulates how memory and imagination are intertwined. It is
only through imagination that we can construct a coherent narrative that connects the past with
the future and it is only through imagination that the future can be different from the difficult
past.11
The two museums in Sarajevo have been selected as illustrative examples of how such a moral,
mnemonic imagination can emerge through the curating of objects from the everyday of the
siege, thus furthering our understanding of the museum as a potentially productive site for tran-
sitional justice processes. The curatorial decisions to engage with the everyday are a process
7 E.g., Helen Berents, ‘An Embodied Everyday Peace in the Midst of Violence,’ Peacebuilding 3(2) (2015): 1–14; Roger Mac
Ginty and Oliver P. Richmond, ‘The Local Turn in Peace Building: A Critical Agenda for Peace,’ Third World Quarterly 34(5)
(2013): 763–783; Lia Kent, ‘Engaging with “The Everyday”: Towards a More Dynamic Conception of Hybrid Transitional Justice,’
in Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development: Critical Conversations, ed. Joanne Wallis, Lia Kent, Miranda Forsyth,
Sinclair Dinnen and Srinjoy Bose (Canberra: ANU Press, 2018): 145–161; Roger Mac Ginty, ‘Everyday Peace: Bottom-up and
Local Agency in Conflict-Affected Societies,’ Security Dialogue 45(6) (2014): 548–564; Johanna Mannergren Selimovic, ‘Everyday
Agency and Transformation. Place, Body and Story in the Divided City,’ Cooperation and Conflict 54(2) (2018): 131–148.
8 Diana Walters, Daniel Laven and Peter Davis, eds., Heritage and Peacebuilding (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017).
9 Peter Van den Dungen, ‘The Heritage of Peace: The Importance of Peace Museums for the Development of a Culture of
Peace,’ in Heritage and Peacebuilding, ed. Walters, Laven and Davis, supra n 8.
10 Lederach, supra n 3 at 3, 29; see also Tiffany Fairey and Rachel Kerr, ‘What Works? Creative Approaches to Transitional
Justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina,’ International Journal of Transitional Justice 14(1) (2020): 142–164.
11 Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering, The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012); see also Mihaela Mihai, ‘Architectural Transitional Justice? Political Renewal within the Scars of a Violent Past,’
International Journal of Transitional Justice 12(3) (2018): 515–536.4 • J. Mannergren Selimovic
of ‘heritagization,’ meaning that museums are not neutral stages but agents that convey cer-
tain knowledge.12 It is through this process, inherently loaded with power, that the museums
can make possible inclusive imaginaries of the past and the future.13 Much in the same way as
Hawkes, I thus consider the museum as a form of active archive and a ‘custodian’ of objects
gathered in and selected about a specific event.14
Methodologically the article studies these fleeting processes of affect from a phenomenolog-
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ical standpoint, which considers the non-discursive, tacit realm of the corporeal as an important
site for human beings to make sense of the world.15 It is a realm that is important for politics
and transformation but hard to pin down as it concerns processes that have not yet been con-
solidated into discourses and policies. This realm is approached through a form of systematic
‘analytical autoethnography’ as will be discussed in more detail below.16
The article now proceeds by delving deeper into the literature concerning the everyday of war
and postwar as well as the curation of objects from this everyday. I then ask the reader to join me
in my experience of the exhibitions on the siege of Sarajevo from which I draw out the concep-
tual lenses of authenticity, intimacy and vulnerability. I discuss how these can be used as prisms
through which to understand the strange power of the everyday object and its transformative
potential in societies transitioning from conflict. Drawing the article to a close, I conclude by
making some broader reflections looking beyond the empirical sites in Sarajevo regarding the
relationship between everyday objects, the moral, mnemonic imagination and peace, critically
assessing how encounters with things in museums can aid in restorative world-making in the
aftermath of war and mass atrocity.
R E SE A RCHIN G THE E VERYDAY A ND ITS (CUR ATED) OBJECTS
The lived experience of violent conflict has come to the fore in transitional justice and peace
research, highlighting how work to heal fractures in local communities often differs from the
priorities of top-down transitional justice and peacebuilding efforts. In these studies, the every-
day emerges as a realm for war’s lingering legacies of poverty, oppression and insecurity, but
also for care, community and creativity. The everyday is the privileged site for people in conflict-
affected societies to engage in on-going, multiple and complex practices that seek to break cycles
of violence. These practices can be routine and recurring, or radical and disruptive. The long
intellectual tradition of feminist peace research has likewise taken an interest in how private
and intimate social relations are connected to the macro processes of the making of war and
peace.17 It is by studying such everyday phenomena as sitting around a dinner table, picking
up fruit in the market, hanging out in night clubs or waiting at the bus stop that we can access
crucial information on how the world is made and re-made in the vernacular and how peace
is practised. Through a close reading of such activities, ‘ordinary’ people emerge as competent,
fully engaged agents. In addition, research increasingly takes an interest in the importance of the
material world as well as in discourses and narratives. Research on postconflict processes of coex-
istence and reconciliation study how agents exercise their agency in and through materiality in
the everyday. This makes a lot of sense, as the everyday by definition is experienced corporeally
and everyday objects are always seen, touched and incorporated into lived experience.
12 Laurejane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London, New York: Routledge, 2006).
13 Kristen M. Hartmann, ‘Fragmentation and Forgetting: Sarajevo’s Vijećnica,’ International Journal of Heritage Studies 22(4)
(2016): 312–324.
14 Martine L. Hawkes, Archiving Loss: Holding Places for Difficult Memories (Abingdon, New York: Routledge, 2018), 5.
15 Max van Manen, Phenomenology of Practice: Meaning-Giving Methods in Phenomenological Research and Writing, 1st ed. (New
York: Routledge, 2014).
16 Sarah Stahlke Wall, ‘Toward a Moderate Autoethnography,’ International Journal of Qualitative Methods 15(1) (2016): 1–9.
17 E.g., Christine Sylvester, War as Experience: Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis, War, Politics and
Experience Series (Abingdon, New York: Routledge, 2013); Cynthia H. Enloe, Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of
the Iraq War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).The Stuff from the Siege • 5
In the aftermath of war, the memory of war and how to remember and to forget is also an
everyday presence, represented by monuments, memorials, rituals and murals that become part
of the everyday and can help or hinder peace.18 While most public displays tend to focus on the
heroic and extraordinary, there are also monuments that commemorate ordinary citizens and
accentuate how certain types of violence tear apart the everyday web of relations. For example,
one of the memorials that commemorates victims of a terrorist attack against a bar in Northern
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Ireland is, according to Brown, ‘a muralized recreation of the bar itself … foregrounding the
normality of a place.’19
Approaching the key focus of this study, beyond such symbolic sites for commemoration we
find the ‘authentic’ objects that in one way or another remind us of the conflict and of the dead
and disappeared. There is a rich and diverse body of literature that from various angles discusses
the power of objects in relation to trauma, war and mass atrocity. Many survivors testify to the
immense importance of ordinary objects that remind of those that were killed or disappeared
during war. In Ahmed’s terms, such material things are ‘sticky objects,’ meaning that they gen-
erate emotions that get attached to them and have a sustained impact over time.20 Such things
are also defined as ‘difficult’ in that they may evoke pain and insecurity and open a dark abyss
to worlds where normal conventions have been dissolved through violence. They play a role as
carriers of stories, of memories, of evidence, and some of them, like the things I think about in
this article, are archived in museums as part of public collections.21
So, what happens when a thing belonging to the ordinary stuff of everyday life is selected
and turned into an artefact in a museum? The object is removed from its environment, where
it has coexisted with a myriad of other things as minute nodes in those webs of relations and
events in which things do their productive work.22 The transformation from ordinary stuff to an
artefact makes the mundane everyday – ‘the seen but unnoticed’ in Featherstone’s well-known
definition-into a matter of cultural heritage which is a statement of its intrinsic value.23 Everyday
objects from war displayed in museums are said to hold specific power. Hawkes argues that key
to their affective power is that they can be understood universally, across time and space, and
that they can inspire visitors’ historical imagination and feeling.24 Yet they may be ignored and
deemed of no importance before they are put on display. Curating the everyday thus brings to
the fore this tension between ‘the mundane materiality of the things versus the invisibility of the
history that resides in them.’25
There are a number of works that in various ways have taken an interest in the power of ordi-
nary things turned into artefacts, demonstrating how fragments rescued from the debris of the
everyday have the capacity to be an active link between the past and the present, between the
18 Brown, Kris, “‘What It Was Like to Live through a Day”: Transitional Justice and the Memory of the Everyday in a Divided
Society,’ The International Journal of Transitional Justice 6(3) (2012): 444–466; Suzanne Buckley-Zistel, ‘Tracing the Politics
of Aesthetics: From Imposing, via Counter to Affirmative Memorials to Violence,’ Memory Studies 14(4) (2021): 781–796;
Susanne Buckley-Zistel and Stefanie Schäfer, eds., Memorials in Times of Transition (Cambridge: Intersentia, 2014); J. Manner-
gren Selimovic, ‘Articulating Presence of Absence: Everyday Memory and the Performance of Silence in Sarajevo,’ in Post-Conflict
Memorialization. Missing Memorials, Absent Bodies, eds. Olivette Otele, Luisa Gandolfo and Yoav Galai (Cham: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2021): 15–34; Amy Sodaro, Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2018).
19 Brown, supra n 18 at 8, 457–458.
20 Sara Ahmed, ‘Happy Objects,’ in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010): 29–51.
21 Martine Louise Hawkes, supra n 14 at 6.
22 cf. Stef Jansen, ‘People and Things in the Ethnography of Borders: Materialising the Division of Sarajevo,’ Social Anthropology
21(1) 2013): 23–37.
23 Mike Featherstone, ‘The Heroic Life and Everyday Life,’ Theory, Culture & Society 9(1) (1992): 159, 159–182.
24 Martine Louise Hawkes, ‘Memory, Identity, and Possession: Personal Objects from Genocide in Galleries, Museums, and
Archives,’ in Postgenocide, ed. Klejda Mulaj (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
25 Presca Ahn, ‘Review: Orhan Pamuk’s “the Innocence of Objects,”’ The American Reader, 2014, http://theamerican
reader.com/review-orhan-pamuks-the-innocence-of-objects/.6 • J. Mannergren Selimovic
dead and the living.26 A lot of research builds upon the groundbreaking work of Holocaust schol-
ars such as for example Young, and Hirsch and Spitz.27 Their pioneering writings on objects
related to the Holocaust remain important lenses on the power of things. In the Bosnian context,
research has looked at the role of objects retrieved from mass graves of victims of the genocide
in Srebrenica. Survivors tell of their relationship to the objects that were collected as evidence
from mass graves by investigators for the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia
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(ICTY). Some of them are everyday objects, such as a watch that identifies a victim, or are
directly linked to the violence, such as a wire twisted into handcuffs. They are all – in the context
of the court – evidence, but simultaneously carry multiple meanings.28 Some of the objects are
on display at the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial where their affect also travels transnationally
through the digital display at the memorial centre’s website. Likewise, the travelling exhibition
‘Everyday Objects Transformed by the Conflict’ consisted of memorial objects collected and
kept by families of people killed by paramilitary and British forces in Northern Ireland, anal-
ysed by Crooke as objects of mourning, objects as evidence and objects as memorial.29 Another
relevant example from the Balkan region is the House Museum in Kosovo, a private house trans-
formed into a museum by its owner Ferdonijue Qerkezi, whose husband and four sons were
disappeared during the ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by Serb military and police forces
in 1999. The house is now a memorial site that displays, mourns and protests the loss of her
lifeworld.30 Finally, I want to note Sylvester’s most recent work on the memorialization of war
in which she draws out the difference between the rather ‘exuberant’ children’s memorial in
Hiroshima commemorating the children killed by the Atomic bomb in 1945, and the quiet but
still ‘enormously compelling’ display of a tricycle that belonged to one of the children on display
in the museum.31
These studies support the argument by Witcomb, which is that artefacts from war and atroc-
ity are always ‘a form of testimony that demands an ethical response.’32 However, that demand
may go unheard. Lynch, referring to museums that deal with atrocities of slavery and geno-
cide, criticizes tendencies to avoid anger and dissenting voices in exhibitions that are curated
in a way that shuts down any possibility of sustained engagement: ‘We look in silence, we walk
away, nothing happens.’33 Such mnemonic moments in the museum may conceal more than
they reveal. Another criticism is forwarded by Tinning who asks whether trauma can ever be
made pedagogical, a question also raised in Young’s investigation of material objects in Holo-
caust memorial museums in which he notes that affective encounters do not necessarily generate
historical knowledge.34
In this study, I pose a slightly different question as I am interested in exploring the connec-
tion between the power of everyday artefacts and the relevance of the museum as a site for the
26Crooke, supra n 32 at 10.
27Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, ‘Testimonial Objects,’ in The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the
Holocaust, ed. Marianne Hirsch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 177–202; James E. Young, The Texture of Memory:
Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
28 Olivera Simic, ‘Memorial Culture in the Former Yugoslavia: Mothers of Srebrenica and the Destruction of Artefacts by the
ICTY,’ in The Arts of Transitional Justice: Culture, Activism, and Memory after Atrocity, ed. Peter Rush and Olivera Simic (London:
Springer, 2014): 155–172.
29 Elizabeth Crooke, ‘Artefacts as Agents for Change: Commemoration and Exchange via Material Culture,’ Irish Political Studies
31(1) (2016): 86–100.
30 Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Melanie Klinkner, ‘Longing for Lost Normalcy: Social Memory, Transitional Justice, and
the “House Museum” to Missing Persons in Kosovo,’ Nationalities Articles 47(2) (2019): 232–247.
31 Christine Sylvester, ‘National War Heritage at the Australian War Memorial and Hiroshima Peace Park,’ Millennium 49(2)
(2021): 280–304.
32 Andrea Witcomb, ‘Toward a Pedagogy of Feeling: Understanding How Museums Create a Space for Cross-Cultural
Encounters,’ in The International Handbook of Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald and Helen Rees Leahy (Hoboken: Wiley,
2015).
33 Bernadette Lynch, ‘Disturbing the Peace: Museums, Democracy and Conflict,’ in Walters, Laven and Davis, supra n 8 at 4.
34 Katrine Tinning, ‘Vulnerability as a Key Concept in Museum Pedagogy on Difficult Matters,’ Studies in Philosophy and
Education 37(2) (2018): 147–165.The Stuff from the Siege • 7
construction of peace. I seek to develop existing research on the everyday object to understand
more systematically its links to the moral, mnemonic imagination that makes peace possible,
something of importance to transitional justice research and practice. This point of departure
understands that while peace is formed in relation to structural, economic and territorial pro-
cesses and conditions, peace is always also a social construction and a creative process in our
everyday lives with an affective, embodied dimension. The two museums in Sarajevo have been
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selected for this investigation as they actively promote a discourse of peace and coexistence and
illustrate how everyday objects may be used to destabilize increasingly divisive narratives of the
past. They are thus sites well suited to an investigation into the connection between everyday
artefacts and the moral, mnemonic imagination conducive to peace. The next step is to present
the methodology that makes such an analysis possible.
E M BODIED M ETHODS FOR STUDIE S IN MUSEU MS
To approach the affective force of objects empirically, it may seem obvious that sensory experi-
ences should be central, however close engagement with actual things is often lacking in research
on materiality and museums, with writings devoid of reflections on the ‘weight, temperature,
smell, three-dimensionality, textural qualities, taste, movement, colour.’35 Trying to rectify this
lack, I here use my subjective experiences of the exhibitions as empirical material in order to
bring sensory experiences into the discussion. The relevance of such an exploration comes from
the phenomenon of ‘prosthetic memory,’ which alludes to second-hand witnessing of repre-
sentations of the past. Prosthetic memory stems from the sensory experience of encountering
objects; an encounter which is highly relevant for moral, mnemonic imagination as it ‘becomes
part of one’s personal archive of experience, informing not only one’s subjectivity but one’s
relationship to the present and future.’36
My investigation into the affective force of objects at the two museums in Sarajevo thus takes a
phenomenological approach as I investigate the process whereby prosthetic memories become
part of my archive of experience. In so doing it is important to bear in mind the impossibility of
full representation as these prosthetic memories concern ‘bleeding and porous territory’ that is
not so easily packaged as cognitive knowledge.37 The analysis builds upon my ‘situated gaze’ at
the museum collections.38 It is a concept that acknowledges the researcher’s own positionality
and does not presuppose that one’s own emotions and embodied experiences are a blueprint for
how these objects ‘should’ be approached. The relationship between the object in the museum
and the subject, the visitor, is always contextual, depending on positionalities, the wider context
and the moment in time. In line with phenomenological methodology, such an undertaking is
about investigating the uniqueness of an experience. It is the sustained concentration and reflec-
tion around a specific encounter, with an ambition to obtain a rich understanding, that brings
validity to the project.39
As the study departs from myself, it may be warranted to more explicitly state my own posi-
tionality here as a ‘close outsider,’ as I have not lived through the siege. However, as members
of my immediate family have that particular experience, the historical trauma is enmeshed in
my everyday life, a specific positionality that, as all positionalities, affects my experience of the
objects. To that may be also added the fact that I explored the exhibitions as a researcher rather
35 Sandra H. Dudley, ed., Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations (London, New York: Routledge, 2010),
279.
36 Landsberg, cited in Joy Sather-Wagstaff, ‘Making Polysense of the World: Affect, Memory, Heritage,’ in Tolia-Kelly, Waterton
and Watson, supra n 2 at 2, 34.
37 Ibid., 38.
38 See Johanna Mannergren Selimovic, ‘Gender, Narrative and Affect: Top-down Politics of Commemoration in Post-Genocide
Rwanda,’ Memory Studies 13(2) (2020): 131–145.
39 van Manen, supra n 15 at 6. See also Anita Gibbs ‘The Power of One,’ Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work 25 (2013): 15–24.8 • J. Mannergren Selimovic
than as an ‘ordinary’ visitor, which means that I approach the museum experience critically with
notebook in hand, which is different from other visitors who more aimlessly ramble through the
exhibitions.40 Importantly, my own experiences in the museum are not used to generalize about
the experiences of other visitors, who may hold a number of positionalities. Instead, as stated
above, the personal and unique experience is always the starting point for a phenomenological
analysis. It is here used to draw out and theorize what ordinary objects do, and why they are
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powerful as vehicles in transformations from conflict to peace.
The limitation of a phenomenological study is that it cannot more broadly capture the reac-
tions of a multitude of visitors from different positionalities, as studies that use surveys and
interviews with visitors seek to do.41 Still, a close and detailed reading from one particular posi-
tion generates propositions that may then possibly be ‘tested’ in other contexts or in relation to
a range of other visitors. However, this is not the undertaking of this particular article.
In concrete terms, I have visited both museums three times, staying for approximately one
hour each visit, noting and recording my own affective responses to the exhibitions. I have inter-
viewed the museum directors as well as studied presentations on the museum websites as part of
a background mapping of the exhibitions. In addition, my decades of research and writing about
Bosnia and Herzegovina feed into my analysis in a way that is hard to pin down in a description
of method but is obviously of relevance from a phenomenological perspective.
SITUATIN G THE MUSEU MS IN THE CON TE X T OF
POST WA R S A R A JE VO
The Bosnian war in 1992–1995 saw at least 100,000 people killed and over 2.2 million peo-
ple displaced, which makes it the most devastating war in Europe since the end of the Second
World War. It was a war of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide as well as massive destruction that
included the demolition of more than 70 percent of houses, cultural heritage and infrastructure.
The postwar public discourse and politics are dominated by nationalist agendas, partly as a result
of the Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the war. The internationally brokered agreement
constructed a peace that builds upon the ethnic partitioning of territory and political represen-
tation. There have been several transitional justice mechanisms, including the prosecution of war
criminals through ICTY and domestic courts, as well as numerous civil society initiatives to do
with truth, justice and reconciliation, but nevertheless competing victim narratives and denial
discourses regarding responsibility for war and violence abound. Commemoration regarding
the war is consequently often used as an arena for a revisionist re-writing of the past into a tale
of ethnonationalism.
In this commemorative landscape, the collective memory of the siege of Sarajevo has come
under increasing negotiation. The siege that went on for nearly five hungry and violent years was
an act of destruction against a multicultural city (Sarajevo’s prewar population is estimated to
have had 40 percent of intermarriages) and a massive assault on civilian ordinary life as the block-
ade by the Bosnian Serb army turned the urbanscape of about 400,000 inhabitants into a giant
physical and psychological prison. People lived under the terror of snipers and shelling. Streets,
tram stops, school yards, markets were danger zones. People engaged in mundane practices were
‘moving targets’ and bullets and shrapnel tore through living rooms.42 Several hundred mortar
shells a day were fired from the mountains surrounding the city.
40
Cf. Sylvester, supra n 34 at 11.
41
E.g., Geerte M. Savenije and Pieter de Bruijn, ‘Historical Empathy in a Museum: Uniting Contextualisation and Emotional
Engagement,’ International Journal of Heritage Studies 23(9) (2017): 832–845; Duncan Light, Remus Creţan and Andreea-Mihaela
Dunca, ‘Museums and Transitional Justice: Assessing the Impact of a Memorial Museum on Young People in Post-Communist
Romania,’ Societies 11(2) (2021): 43, 1–21.
42 Mirjana Ristić, Architecture, Urban Space and War: The Destruction and Reconstruction of Sarajevo (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan,
2018), 51.The Stuff from the Siege • 9
By the time the siege officially ended on 6 January 1996 the city was in ruins with most of its
key infrastructure destroyed. The war changed the demographics of Bosnia and Herzegovina as
a whole and Sarajevo emerged from the war a contested, divided city.43 As a result, its multi-
cultural identity is less talked about and the experience of the siege as an attack against civilians
regardless of ethnicity has over the years become marginalized by ethnopoliticizing discourses.
There is an increasing militarization of public commemoration with recognizable tropes such as
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the heroization of political and military leaders.44 A top-down (ethno)nationalistic appropria-
tion of memories more focused on elite and military aspects of the war is privileged in lieu of the
civilian experience. Further, writings on Bosnia and Herzegovina tend to be constructed around
ethnonationalist tensions, which obscures the many expressions of resistance from citizens who
do not seek to identify themselves and their fellow citizens in such terms but rather choose a
positionality in opposition to ethnopoliticization.45 The museums in focus for this article take
this stand.46 The museums counteract the growing silence around Sarajevo’s multicultural past
by telling a story of the war that is not driven by ethnonationalist memorialization. Instead they
seek to bring forth the civilian everyday experience of war, as I will now analyse.
ENCOUN TER IN G THE STUFF FROM THE SIEGE
The two museums in focus here have very different histories. The History Museum was estab-
lished just after the Second World War in order to celebrate the Partisan victory, with anti-
fascism as a central theme. After the collapse of Yugoslavia in the beginning of the 1990s, it
was renamed the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina; however the museum functions
independent of government and receives national or municipal funding only sporadically on an
ad hoc basis. A central part of the museum space is now dedicated to an exhibition of the siege.
On its website the Museum states that its aim is to tell the story:
about persistence, resourcefulness and creativity of Sarajevans who lived 1335 days without
electricity, water, heating. At the exhibition you can see how daily life in the city flowed, where
and how Sarajevans procured food and water, how markets and streets looked, how people
communicated, how hospitals and schools operated, how cultural life was developed.
The other museum in focus here is the internationally acclaimed War Childhood Museum.
Initiated in 2015, it is mostly funded by international donors and was developed through a social
activist call on social media by the now director Jasminko Halilović. Having spent his childhood
in the besieged city, Halilović started a website where he asked a simple question: what was a
war childhood for you? Thousands of people shared their stories as well as donated objects from
their childhood. The museum is entirely focused on these objects, as explained on its website:
‘Everyone has an item that reminds them of their childhood; so do people whose childhoods
were affected by war.’ Through the objects and the short explanatory stories that accompany
them the museum aims to portray everyday life for a child or teenager during the siege, including:
housing, living conditions, proximate danger, experience with shelling and sniper fire, experi-
ence of displacement and life as a refugee, schooling, play and games, friendships, leisure time,
health, wounding, and significant losses during the wartime.
43 Scott A. Bollens, ‘City and Soul: Sarajevo, Johannesburg, Jerusalem, Nicosia,’ City 5(2) (2001): 169–187. Stefanie Kappler,
‘Sarajevo’s Ambivalent Memoryscape: Spatial Stories of Peace and Conflict,’ Memory Studies 10(2) (2017): 130–143.
44 Sharon Macdonald, Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today (London: New York: Routledge, 2013).
45 Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms and Ger Duijzings, eds., The New Bosnian Mosaic (London: Routledge, 2007).
46 Personal interview, Elma Hasimbegović, Sarajevo, 11 February 2018; Personal interview, Jasminko Halilović, Sarajevo,
5 June 2018.10 • J. Mannergren Selimovic
The two museums thus explicitly engage with the everyday of the siege and aim to contribute
to an imaginary beyond ethnonationalist, divisionist remembering. The power of the every-
day object as the main carrier of this imaginary became increasingly clear to me through my
embodied experiences of the museums, to which I now turn.
Experiencing the Siege Exhibition at the History Museum
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As I walk through the reception hall and up the stairs in the History Museum, I note its derelict
state. Hardly any renovations have been undertaken since the war and the building is severely
marked by bullets and grenades. The heating has been cut off and on my visit in wintertime there
is a raw chill in the building.47 The signs of the violent force of bullets and grenades shrink the
time since the war; it is as if the sound of splintering glass and the whistle of grenades linger in
there. As I walk through the halls that contain the exhibition I am confronted by an abundance
of objects and photos that all relate to the everyday life under siege and I get an understanding of
these and many other facets of life under the siege. Some objects are familiar to me, like bicycles,
wheelbarrows and books. Other things are unfamiliar to my own everyday, such as humanitarian
tin cans and bullet cases.
The first arrangement that draws my attention is a reconstruction of a kitchen. There is a clut-
tered, mundane family life going on there. The familiar situation of making a dinner is easily
recognizable, except that the details are skewed: the window is replaced by plastic provided by
UNHCR, dinner includes a tin of humanitarian aid to be cooked on a stove that is made up of
parts of a can and parts of a gutter. Close by, a bicycle leaning against a wall is intricately loaded
with plastic canisters used to collect water. The display tells the museum’s story of ‘persistence,
resourcefulness and creativity’ which I readily embrace, spending a long time trying to work out
the technical details of the collection of different stoves made from various metal debris, used
for heating and for cooking. I also become engrossed in a text in a notebook that contains recipes
for war meals. I wonder at how people, city-dwellers, learnt to solve the millions of problems and
minute challenges of getting enough water, food and heating to survive.
I move on to another display – a glass case holding a knitted blue jumper. It is small, fitting
maybe a four-year-old. In a photograph next to it I see a child who is wearing the jumper, hold-
ing on to his mother’s hand. He is looking serious, with his gaze slightly turned away from the
photographer. There is a second photo of him, but now he is dead, lying in the street. The images
shock me; I recoil, then involuntarily reach out towards the jumper, somehow searching for the
boy Ermin who once wore it, my skin tingling with my own memory of what it feels like to
be hugging the solid little body of a beloved four-year-old. The little jumper makes the loss of
children’s lives tangible for just a moment.
A hand-made sign fastened to a pole then grasps my attention. It reads Pazi Snajper (‘Watch
out – Sniper’). It was made by someone to warn his or her fellow citizens, making the effort to
place it at a particular dangerous crossing. Seeing the sign, knowing that the ruined building of
the museum is a result of the snipers the sign warns against, I tense up and my shoulders hunch.
Other things that I encounter at the exhibition are more spectacular. They were produced and
used in ordinary settings but in contrast to the domestic objects above, they are loaded with the
restless energy of political protests. One of them reminds of a protest action which became world
famous during the siege: the partly ironic organizing of a Miss Sarajevo contest in a basement.
The banner that the young women held up stated ‘Don’t let them kill us’ and now the banner
47 At the time of fieldwork, due to political deadlock the museum did not receive any funding for daily running costs, only
some short-term support on a project basis. Just like six other art institutions which were on state level before the war, the History
Museum does not get any long-term funds, as the state level, comprising both the Bosnian Serb entity of Republika Srpska and the
Bosniak-Croat Federation, cannot agree on the funding of these institutions. The museum survives on small funds handed out on
a short-term basis.The Stuff from the Siege • 11
hangs on the wall in the museum. The contest has become an iconic event that often features in
documentaries and the like about the siege, and it also became known through the song Miss
Sarajevo written by Bono and Brian Eno that protested the world’s reluctance to intervene in
the war. When I now get a chance to see the banner for myself, its many representational layers
of symbolic value and fame peel away. Instead I peer at the stitching, imagining how this work
was carried out by young people who used whatever material they could get their hands on and
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managed to organize the contest in the middle of destruction.
Experiencing the War Childhood Museum
To enter the War Childhood Museum is to enter a very different environment. It is brand new
and the sleekness of its grey surfaces talks to transnational museum architecture trends and its
design beckons me to walk through the exhibition hall in a well-known pattern and pace. Com-
pared to the fairly cluttered halls at the historical museum, the space is calm, containing a number
of well-spaced cases that each contain just one object. They are the most ordinary things. They
trigger nostalgic memories associated with youth and childhood, similar to things that I also
have handled, loved and treasured. The doll, the monopoly board, the LP sleeve – it is the kind
of stuff that a lot of people have tucked away in a cardboard box somewhere. Here they have been
selected and put on display, telling a range of stories concerning the childhood of war.
Many of the objects on display at the War Childhood Museum are things that brought joy
to their owners during the war and generate a swirl of happiness also in the present. A bright
blue Walkman. A guitar. A pair of a ballet shoes. There is also a well-used Monopoly board and I
smile as I read the meticulous recording of a particular game. Selma, who donated the board to
the museum, kept the note that records a memorable moment during the war:
On this very hot summer day, this ‘very heated’ game ended with Omer going bankrupt and
he’s now singing sad Russian songs. Selma took over all the possible properties except for the
START, parking, prison and surprise. This was the best round ever played in our five-year
history of Monopoly. We congratulate the winner and wish her the best of luck but with real
money this time. Sarajevo 2 August 1994 3.26 p.m.
As in the History Museum, a shocking intimate loss is made visible at the War Childhood
Museum, this time of a child losing its parent. One of the objects on display is a page torn from a
notebook. It is a letter, dated ‘24. 3 1993, Sarajevo.’ Its neat handwriting ends abruptly after half
a page. On the board next to it Aida describes why she chose to donate the letter to the museum:
Before the war we lived in a village near Foča. We managed to flee to Sarajevo at the start of
the war. My dad immediately enlisted in the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina. By June 1992
he had already lost his life on the front line. My mother, my brother, and I were placed in
temporary housing in Alipašino Polje. My mother started writing this letter to our neighbor
in the countryside. A shell landed on our apartment 25 March 1993. My mother was killed as
she cooked us dinner. She never finished writing that letter.
Over the years of my engagement with Bosnia and Herzegovina I have listened to many such
tragic losses. But the sheet of paper with its neat handwriting still shocks me in its concrete
manifestation of the abrupt cut-off line between life and death. It is a flimsy object but its affective
power is immense.12 • J. Mannergren Selimovic
A N A LYSIN G THE M E A NING OF THE STUFF: AU THEN TICIT Y,
IN TI M AC Y A ND VULNER A BILIT Y
These brief vignettes of my encounter with the stuff from the siege demonstrate how objects
from the siege produced moments of intensity that are particular to their ‘everydayness’ – they
were never meant to be anything but ordinary, yet they now carry the pain of lost webs of human
relations. The strong emotional reactions they generate seem to derive from the tension between
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the very ordinariness of the objects, and the extraordinariness of the time and space of the siege
of Sarajevo that they represent. From the moments above, distilled from my fieldnotes, emerge
some central aspects of everyday objects, which I propose are key to their affective power. The
three aspects that make the everyday objects so powerful is that they are authentic, they open
up for intimate encounters and they generate vulnerability.
First, when it comes to authenticity, the complex vibrancy of the objects is linked to their
authenticity. Authenticity seems to matter for the experience, as the associative potential of an
object lies to a large degree in the affective understanding of how historical context in some way
‘rubs off ’ on to the thing itself.48 My curiosity about seeing the survival kits of plastic canisters,
and stoves made out of bits and pieces is linked to their being ‘real.’ I recognize them from stories
and from documentaries. In the museum I can study them in detail. The everyday object on
display is thus sticky with history, and while selected and curated, it is considered to be authentic
and a direct representation of ‘what it was like.’ The fact that it belonged to or was touched by a
victim gives the thing an additional moral weight, as a proof of a war crime.
The claims to authenticity are supported by the fact that both exhibitions have come about
through citizen engagement. Things are brought in continuously to the History Museum and
when people visit the exhibition they usually take active part, for example adding more knowl-
edge about a particular event that they see in a photograph, providing a description of how the
hospital organized surgeries or explaining the different uses of snails in cooking. For example,
the banner from the Miss Sarajevo contest was folded away in a private basement until 2018
when it was donated and made the transition to an important museum artefact.49 Similarly, the
War Childhood Museum is continuously collecting oral testimonies and accepting more items.
The museum began as a call-out on social media for stories about childhoods in the besieged
city by activist-turned-museum director Jasminko Halilović, who endured the siege as a child
himself.50 Thus the authenticity of the exhibitions is continuously strengthened by their inter-
action with the outside world of everyday debris from the siege, floating around in the ongoing
everyday of the postwar city.
The careful curation by the museum has turned the objects into artefacts, moving them from
private memory to collective remembrance.51 The curating of the exhibitions – the selection and
interpretation – is differently stressed in the two museums. The design of the exhibition in the
History Museum tries partly to imitate the context in which these objects were found – as for
example the kitchen set discussed above. This is accentuated by the porous barrier between the
curated exhibition and the museum space that is itself scarred by grenades. The War Childhood
Museum on the contrary stresses the curating process in its exhibition design.
As a second lens, intimacy is proposed. It seems that authenticity, providing a ‘direct’ link to
moments of pain through relatable ordinary objects, makes intimate encounters possible. How-
ever, the stuff from the siege is not quite like other mundane everyday artefacts. Unlike what
Levine writes about the mundane in museums, which requires ‘sustained attention rather than
48 Dylan van Gerven, Anne Land-Zandstra and Welmoet Damsma, ‘Authenticity Matters: Children Look beyond Appearances
in Their Appreciation of Museum Objects,’ International Journal of Science Education (Part B) 8(4) (2018): 325–339.
49 Personal interview, supra n 52 at 17.
50 Ibid.
51 Olick, supra n 6 at 4.The Stuff from the Siege • 13
rapid response for these things to come into view,’ the objects representing the siege are ordi-
nary but made extraordinary because of the outrageous history they represent.52 The immediate
feelings of rupture I experienced in the exhibition halls were induced by this difficult heritage
as the things give ‘a terrible gift’ and they hurt.53 The fact that the objects, especially in the War
Childhood Museum, are displayed ‘silently’ with very few prompts helps in creating a direct
contact with this pain.54 In their shocking revealing of the everyday of life under siege, they
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contain both the strange and the familiar. Hence, when thinking about intimacy in relation to
the experience in the museums, they do not offer an intimate encounter in the sense of fully
knowing what it was like to live in Sarajevo during the siege. Rather, intimacy reflects the open-
ing of an emotional space in which it is possible to be receptive to the experience of the other.
Bonnell and Simon suggest that intimacy involves a sense not of ‘knowing’ the other, but of
receptivity to the particulars of her experience and to the troubling emotions that accompany
uncertainty.’ Further, intimacy is an act of acknowledgement that ‘resists attempts to reduce the
other’s experience to something graspable or containable.’55
This key insight resonates with my experiences at the museums. I think about the moment
when I instinctively hunched my shoulders, responding to the call to ‘look out for snipers’; a ten-
sion that I took with me to the street outside of the museum, today a busy thoroughfare, then a
ghostlike site of destruction. The moment of intimacy in the museum has nothing to do with the
real experience of trying to navigate a crossing under the siege; rather it is a moment of acknowl-
edging the difference between then and now. In accordance with Bonnell and Simon’s insight,
the moment of intimacy thus contains an acknowledgement of the experience of the other that
does not reduce to it to something that the visitor can actually know. Likewise, the encounter
with the recognizable things from youth and childhood in the War Childhood museum also
held moments of this intimacy. The strength of my own childhood memories of the triumphs
and miseries of playing Monopoly made it possible to intimately relate to these joys that hap-
pened under fire, not to claim it was ‘the same’ but on the contrary acknowledging the crucial
difference between a childhood in peacetime and a childhood in wartime.
Building on the affect of authenticity and intimacy, vulnerability as a third lens points to the
precarity of life under the siege that encounters with everyday objects make visible. Here I lean
on Tinning whose work on museum pedagogy brings out vulnerability as key to ethical responsi-
bility generated in the intimate encounter with the other.56 It is strange to experience this unique
power of the vulnerable object. Strange, because we live in a mediatized world where there is no
lack of horrific footage of the suffering that war induces and there is often a sense of distancing, as
‘images anaesthetize.’57 It is closely linked to the non-cognitive affect; a moment of ‘feeling the
objects’ that leaves the visitor raw and vulnerable to perceiving the other and possibly receiv-
ing the ‘terrible gift’ of the difficult objects that come from the everyday of violence and war.
It further encompasses the acknowledgement of the visitor’s own vulnerability to the affective
power of the objects. Thinking now about the soft knitted blue jumper I saw, I also feel that the
object itself is somehow vulnerable, and that the museum, by salvaging it and transforming it
into an artefact, is protecting it from decomposing into oblivion – the jumper is keeping alive
the memory of the boy who wore it.
52 Gabriel Levine, ‘The Museum of Everyday Life: Objects and Affects of Glorious Obscurity,’ Journal of Curatorial Studies 4(3)
(2015): 364–390.
53 Roger I. Simon, ‘The Terrible Gift: Museums and the Possibility of Hope without Consolation,’ Museum Management and
Curatorship 21(3) (2006): 187–204.
Light, Creţan and Dunca, supra n 44 at 14, 43.
54 Cf Jenny Kidd and Joanne Sayner, ‘Intersections of Silence and Empathy in Heritage Practice,’ International Journal of Heritage
Studies 25(1) (2019): 1–4.
55 Jennifer Bonnell and Roger I. Simon, “‘Difficult” Exhibitions and Intimate Encounters,’ Museum and Society 5(2) (2015).
56 Tinning, supra n 37 at 11, 65–85.
57 Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 197.You can also read
