Thirty years later, I decided to walk this invisible geometry, or more precisely, fragments of it that weren’t forgotten. Almost 300 unrecorded punkts existed in besieged Sarajevo. I ended up with a map retracing the itinerary of three teachers to the punkts . It was impossible to map the trips of children, there were so many of them; they still escape any authority, even the one of representation. Along the teacher’s itinerary, I was walking through unimportant, trivial parts of town, between blocks in the large housing settlements, sometimes on the backside of the city. Given the overwhelming importance of Ottoman and Austro- Hungarian architectural heritage to the detriment of that of the Yugoslav socialist period, these are considered the non- aesthetic parts of the city. My own walk, in that sense, was a kind of resistance to dominant aesthetics in the city of Sarajevo, where the architecture of everday life in the housing settlements is invisible and merged with the urban context almost to the point of disappearance. This resounds with Aldo Van Eyck’s playgrounds melting into the city – an invisible architecture that is, and was during the seige, the scenery of play. The playing out of school used its own aesthetics, or rather anti-aesthetics, of detoured objects and architectures. Caillois describes play as unproductive, ‘creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements of any kind; and except for the exchange of property among players, ending in a situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game.’ 6 There is no sign of it taking place, apart from the collective memory of this generation, kept in old school books and washed out photos. Play is unproductive and gathers unproductive objects found in these war playgrounds, such as defused mortars. When Robert Rauschenberg went to study art at Black Mountain College after WWII, Merce Cunningham said, ‘He made this object out of sticks of wood he found in the street, pieces of newspaper, some plastic. There were some comic strips on it. There were ribbons hanging, and you could go through it or around it or even underneath it. I thought it was beautiful. The colour was so extravagant with all of these materials he’d found in the street. Rauschenberg began creating works out of found objects when, like other artists of his generation, he was looking for a way to move beyond abstract expressionism […]. These objects created of found fragments, inaugurated the ready-made in art as a critical attitude towards the prevailing aesthetics of arts. By repositioning them they are stripped of their original significance and given a new one. 7 Rauschenberg would have been fond of Čedo’s photo. In it, the order of representation is completely inverted: the bomb is totally defused, its meaning to be re-invented. This is the rewriting of war by the children, the winning of the battle: they fought it, through play, by the make-believe of living, by detouring its spatial field and objects, like this mortar in arms on a sunny day. They played it out in their own junk playground. And what is play but a ‘rehearsal of living reality’? 8 £
above, playground along Marka Marulića Street.
left, the playground area in today’s Alipašino Polje settlement below, open playground in an interstitial area in Čengić Vila housing settlement.
Darine Choueiri
6 Ibid. 7 ‘Rauschenberg Shifted Pa th of American Art’. All things Considered, NPR News: https://www.npr.org/templates/ story/story.php?storyId=90411572 8 Berg, Leila. Look at kids. Penguin Books, 1972, p. 120. ‘Fantasy is an exploration of living reality, and play a rehearsal of living reality, and we use them both as tools of growth that will help us first understand our reality, and then help us shape it with awareness and competence.’
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on site review 44 : play ©
Darine Choueiri
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