monuments | media by novka cosovic
The Museum
war function screen memory detai ls sites
A video of this project tours through multiple 1:50 scale architecture models of various tunnels. It was made using an iPhone attached to a toy car. A mirror was placed on top of the iPhone, angled at 45 degrees to the camera, making it possible to record a direct view of the tunnels. Sound effects come from various news broadcasts. For example, when entering the Pool Tunnel (page 62), one can hear a foreign language and splashing water, taken from a CNN documentary on the Syrian Civil War.
the museum how trauma reaches us
My father once told me that after the civil war, a big cloud dropped over the land. He had grown up in Yugoslavia; there had never been such dense fog. Although I had never been to Sarajevo, I watched and listened to the war through technology – television, live radio and telephone. I do not consider myself a war-child; perhaps a Baudrillard- child, because photographic images, telephone calls and live news broadcasts were my only source of ‘truth’ during the civil war. Yet, I realised at a very young age, television made false representations that confused the ratio between the original and its imitation. Information that I gathered through my mother’s anxious, loud conversations in long- distance phone calls, did not quite correlate with the information I gathered from CNN. In August of 2011, I went to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, and while there visited several World War II monuments that Josip Tito had placed across the Yugoslavian landscape to pinpoint a specific event or to commemorate a unique battle – one battalion versus another, fighting and shedding blood with the landscape as the absolute backdrop, the stage to all atrocity. Cultural groups who have suffered from war and violence tend to do this – they commission a ‘we will never forget’ or ‘we are an anomaly’ monument.
A few days later, a friend and I went for an evening walk around the city of Pale. He stopped and pointed at a hotel: ‘There’s a pool in that hotel that use to store dead bodies of soldiers and victims during the 90s war. People still use it as a pool today’. I’d already swum in that pool, and then I found out that the tiles and sealant had not been replaced since the war. Understandably, civilians had to use that pool to store dead bodies; they did not know where else to put them, so they put the dead bodies in that empty pool. There were no hospitals or morgues in that rural area, so they had to pervert the space. And not only did they pervert the space, but after the war, they also tried to bring back that space to its original state – as a swimming pool.
View this video on our website: www.onsitereview.ca/30
far left: Tito-era monuments at Podgaric and Tjentiste marking World War Two monumental battles. ´ ˇ below: Novka Cosovic, The Museum . The Hospital: During the civil war in Sarajevo, a mortar shell hit the Kosevo ˇ Hospital. Some patients were killed either by the explosion or gun-point execution.Today, it is used as a hospital, again.Time has changed, but most of the finishes, particularly the strip of tanned yellow paint and floor tiles are still there. Nowadays when watching the news based on Syria or Lebanon or Iraq, one cannot help but notice the backgrounds in hospitals, because they look familiar. It is that same strip of tanned yellow (or green) paint, found in the Kosevo Hospital. ˇ
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Novka Cosovic
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