ABSTRACT
The loss of security and something common to turn to In February 2015, a documentary video by Radio Slobodna Evropa (Radio Free Europe) became the subject of heated debate in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Interviews with teenagers from Mostar in the documentary ‘Perspektiva’ revealed the unbelievable dimension the ethnic segregation had reached in the city within the last two decades; indeed, several newspapers printed a 15-year-old schoolboy’s assertions that he has never crossed the bridge between the Croat and the Bosniak part of his hometown Mostar, and added that Catholics and Muslims can be distinguished by the colour of their skin (Perspektiva 2015). Mostar, as this media incident affirmed once more, is a divided city with sides that in many respects refuse to co-operate and to ‘imagine community’ beyond ethnic and religious demarcations. The (Catholic) Croats today live without exception on the western side, the (Muslim) Bosniaks on the eastern side of Mostar. John Calame and Esther Charlesworth in their study Divided Cities interpret ‘physical partitions as indicators of a failure to provide security at the municipal scale’ (2009: 144). The urban contract in intact cities guarantees a safe life and reliable public services within the common city walls in exchange for subordination to a corporate city identity or for taxation purposes, for instance. This basic contract between the city managers and the communities within the city is breached in divided cities: neither is there a common identity nor is security provided. Calame and Charlesworth suggest that by the time urban partitions appear, at least one urban community has experienced a loss of security so severe that the cost of vulnerability outweighs the benefits of co-operation (2009: 153). This chapter will explore the temporal and spatial dimensions of the revised urban contract and comment on the failure of urban management in divided Mostar as they are presented in artistic depictions. In doing so, it will refer to a film, a novel and to a statue and the performance relating to the latter’s dedication: Bobo Jelčić’s film Obrana i zaštita (2013), Veselin Gatalo’s novel Vuk (2009) and the Bruce Lee statue project of the artists group Urban Movement Mostar (2005).
