"Augmented Sarajevo": Digitally Reconstructing War Heritage and the Sense of Place

The Siege of Sarajevo (1992-95) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, transformed the city into a landscape of ruins. One site of destruction was the Oslobođenje building, where Sarajevo’s daily newspaper was produced. Even though it was one of the first buildings shelled, it continued to be used during the siege as the newspaper was published daily from the basement that was still accessible. The destruction was documented by Sarajevo’s architects in a war-time project entitled “Warchitecture” (1993). In 1998, there was a decree by which the building was to be preserved as a ruin to commemorate the urbicid and the resilience of people in the face of destruction. This, however, was never followed through and the ruin of the Oslobođenje building was eventually demolished. The Augmented Sarajevo initiative aims to use available technologies to digitally reconstruct destroyed built environment and make it available on site as a mobile technology application. In a bottom-up approach, this citizens’ initiative includes both expert and lay perspectives on war heritage and its role in the remembrance of the siege. Due to its symbolic value, the Oslobođenje building is selected as a first case-study where we plan to create an augmented filter to reenact the sense of place through digital reconstruction, personal memory recordings and historic research. This paper will discuss the significance of the built environment during the siege and today - three decades after – to argue that technology has a great potential to reinforce collective remembrance discourses. After analysing problems with current approaches to war-damage reconstruction of heritage, the chapter will focus on the inception of the Augmented Sarajevo initiative that aims to document intersections of personal memory and existing collective framings of memory to provide space for this relationship to develop.