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 project 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.
JUN.-PROF. DR. ŽELJANA TUNIĆ
CURRICULUM VITAE
Željana Tunić has been an associate professor of Slavic cultural studies at MLU Halle-Wittenberg since 2022. Her topics revolve around how societies in Slavic-speaking countries are coming to terms with experiences of war, violence and radical erosion of societal networks. Tunić focuses on literary works as well as cultural processes of various kinds, from performing arts to photographs, exhibitions, monuments or practices of remembrance. She has recently also turned to forensic investigations after mass crimes and their cultural meditation in the public discourse. Additional research on cultural exchange between socialist (South-) Eastern Europe and Africa during the Cold War and its continuing effects today constitutes an integral part of Tunic’s research landscape. She is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Southeast Europe Society (SOG) and leads its branch office in Halle.
