In the wake of the Bosnian War (1992-1995), the city of Zenica underwent a series of dramatic transformations. The bustling steel industry slowed to a near-halt. Overall, local employment plummeted to below 20 percent, and in the years since has barely doubled. The Serb population fled the centrally-situated city, relocating to less-hostile areas throughout the country, and within a decade of the start of the war, the dominating population of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) would rise from 55 to 85 percent. Even as the war officially came to a close, paranoia and tensions ran high. As the economy came crashing to a stop, the population of Zenica entered a period of unsettling safety: a city ready to to begin the slow process of healing and rebuilding—physically and emotionally—while active, untriggered land mines lay just under the surface of the surrounding mountain plains.
Enter Sezam, Zenica's first non-governmental organization, founded to begin the post-war healing process through teachers and their students, building a new social model founded on ideals of tolerance and non-violence. I had the fortunate opportunity of working with Sezam in the summer of 2003, in part as a stills photographer documenting the summer classes staffed by a half-dozen volunteer college students from the United States. The children and teenagers we worked with—from 11-year-olds to high schoolers—were all born into the war, if not into the years immediately proceeding. Many students had personal, vivid memories and stories of violence, horror, and death; all of the students could relate someone's personal tragedy and loss.
During travels beyond the classroom I captured a post-war region frozen in limbo: the industrial world of the steel factory, once again operational, yet a humble shell of its former shelf; the exile of the refugee camps, tucked in the mountainside, where the daily schedule consisted of a walk to the well to check for new water; the communal social experiences of the population; and the patterns of domesticity, both in the city high rise buildings and on rural farmland. Despite differences in social class, economic status, culture, and geography, these post-war “spaces”—my conceptions of industry, exile, social, and home—possess a shared fate: still fragments of a revitalized culture, struggling to be born.
