Käte Hamburger Lecture with Fellow Željana Tunić
WHEN
WHERE
Innovation Center, Campus Saarbrücken, Gebäude A2 1, Seminaraum 3.05.1
LANGUAGE
GERMAN
PROGRAMME
The Käte Hamburger Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation (CURE) and the CEUS | Cluster for European Studies warmly invite you to attend the next Käte Hamburger Lecture at Saarland University. This series allows fellows from the centre to share their latest research perspectives on cultural practices of reparation. After the lectures, audience members will have the opportunity to engage with key topics in more detail during a public discussion session.
Željana Tunić: Zur Kintsugi-Erinnerungsarbeit in der Nachkriegsgesellschaft Bosnien und Herzegowinas
What does it mean to live in environments contaminated by landmines and various military
waste, where torture and killing echo through time? How do people who were unable or, for
some reason, unwilling to flee the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and have remained behind
confront such daily reminders of suffering? This lecture concerns the ways in which livability is reconfigured and restored. By following museum exhibitions, literary works, and movements organized by survivors, I aim to explore three modes of memory work shaped by narratives of survival and never-ending residues of pain. My analysis is guided by the novel Body Kintsugi by a writer from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Senka Marić, which tells a story of illness, fragmentation, and healing. The narration in the second person invites us to inhabit the disfigured and scarred body and set off in search of recovery. In this spirit, I foreground survivors’ agency in not neglecting, hiding, or silencing their wounds but making them parts of restorative meaning-making. The reiterating motives of bodily inflicted pain through violence, shame, grief, loss, and caring solidarities guide the above-mentioned acts of remembrance. In line with Kintsugi poetics of visible and incomplete repair, I seek to capture various states of becoming upon which wounds remain significantly visible.
The Käte Hamburger Lectures provide deeper insight into the centre’s ongoing research, convey these ideas to the wider university community, and invite the public to engage in meaningful discussions on cultural practices of reparation.
