play in wartime schoolscapes DARINE CHOUEIRI
courtesy of Čedo Pavlović
In this photo taken around 1993 in the Hrasno neighbourhood, the boy with the blue tank shirt is holding the carcass of a mortar. He is carefree, posing in the midst of two other friends sitting next to him, each of whom have also one of their hands reaching to touch the loot of the day. The photographer must have said something funny because the boy in yellow sitting on the ground, sealing the composition of this happy group, burst into a genuine laugh while the others, blinded by direct sunlight are smiling while wrinkling their eyes. A bike wheel sticks out from the left side of the photo, probably belonging to one of the boys and taken out on this sunny day for a trip in the neighbourhood. The boy in the middle is Čedo Pavlović, from the neighbourhood of Hrasno; writtten in half-erased white letters on the black billboard crowning the four boys’ heads. Čedo sent me this photo in April 2022, exactly 30 years after the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo in 1992. This photo could have been a trivial one, like many others taken to keep a memory of the giddy years of childhood. But the defused mortar, the blown up store front and the car riddled with bullets give this photo a sense of the uncanny.
A mortar becomes a toy and destruction echoes a laugh.
the new structure of school: play by default
April 1992 the city of Sarajevo is under siege and the schools are closed. For children, war is perceived as a restriction of their freedom, a halt in their physical activities. Adults, aware of the pressure war exercises on children, start scattered initiatives to give children a sense of normality and a basic need: schooling. A person, often a professor, gathers children hiding in the basement of a building and organises a class. These initiatives first appeared in the neighbourhood of Dobrinja and were referred to as Haustorska škola (stairway schools) because they occured in the lower parts of staircases, considered the safest in the apartment blocks. This practice soonl quickly built up into a local school system in Sarajevo, put in place by the Pedagogical Institute of the city. Schooling continued during the war and siege that Sarajevo painfully underwent for four years.
Schooling adapted to the compelling situation of war and siege. In this altered pattern, space and schooling are linked beyond, and often without, the architecture of a specific school building. The war school is a temporary suspension of the rules and hierarchies of regular schooling. A rhizomatic system is implemented, where schooling activity occurs in makeshift classrooms located in rooms considered safe, called punkts . This network spread through the city, clinging to a spatial logic – the urban divisions inherited from the Yugoslav period named Mjesna Zajednice (MZ), or local communities. The MZ is the smallest urban unit to constitute a neighbourhood, or a fragment of a neighbourhood, its perimeter delimitated by streets or natural elements.
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on site review 44 : play ©
Darine Choueiri
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