The project highlights the ongoing challenges of remembrance, decades after the armed conflicts ended in former Yugoslavia and amid the gaps in transitional justice.
The panel session, titled Concealed in Plain Sight: Transcribing Transitional Justice Data Between Remembrance and Erasure, explored how judicial archives and public memory can transform fragmented sites of remembrance into meaningful narratives.
“Bitter Land is not only a map. It’s an attempt to resist forgetting,” said Nejra Mulaomerovic, Senior Project Manager of the Balkan Transitional Justice programme.
“To piece together the fragments scattered in archives, in courtrooms and in the soil itself. By bringing these graves into the public space, we’re saying that these crimes cannot be hidden, these people cannot be erased, and memory cannot be denied.
“I invite you to explore the project online, but more importantly — to reflect on what it means for a society when even the dead are unsettled,” she said.
Three other speakers, Ismar Cirkinagic, Selma CatoviC Hughes, and Anita Karabasic, shared artistic explorations of war archives, examining memory, trauma, and collective commemoration.
ABOAGORA’s interdisciplinary format, combining keynote lectures, panel discussions, and performative sessions, provided a platform to bridge archival research, art, and public engagement, highlighting innovative ways to connect past atrocities with present-day memory.
ABOAGORA is an annual international event that promotes dialogue between the arts, humanities, and sciences, held in Turku, Finland.