projects with similar intentions

by Aida Šehović (artist)
“ŠTO TE NEMA” (= “why are you not here”)

✤ a nomadic monument, dedicated to a collective remembrance of Srebrenica

✤ passersby are invited to participate in the construction of it by filling cups with Bosnian coffee and leaving them in the square, undrunk, in memory of the victims of the Srebrenica Genocide.
(Reflecting the inclusive and universal spirit of the monument)

✤ community building and collective remembrance, honoring victims & survivors

✤ each anniversary of the genocide, Šehović partners with local communities around the world
to organize the monument in the public square of a new city

✤ each annual rendition represents a triumph, over the forces of rejection, exclusion, and denialism
that encourage societies to look away from past atrocities and prevent vital communal remembrance and healing processes from taking place

"When Bosnia and Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1992, ethno-national divisions plunged the country into war. In July of 1995, Bosnian Serb forces invaded a United Nations Safe Area that included the town of Srebrenica, where thousands of Bosnian Muslims had sought refuge from the surrounding violence. While Bosnian Muslim women and girls were forcibly displaced from Srebrenica following the invasion, the remaining 8,373 men and boys were systematically executed. In 2006, the International Court of Justice officially ruled that these events qualified as genocide. Today, ethnic divisions still divide the region. Serbian and Bosnian Serb leaders continue to deny that the Srebrenica Genocide ever took place."

“8372 coffee cups, one for each victim of the Srebrenica genocide”

https://aida-sehovic.squarespace.com/

https://www.sarajevotimes.com/why-are-you-not-here-exhibition-with-8000-cups-of-coffee-opened-in-srebrenica/

Aida Šehović also wrote an open letter to The Swedish Academy Committee for Nobel Prize in Literature in response to the news that Austrian writer Peter Handke, a genocide apologist and supporter of war criminal Slobodan Milošević, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2019. She read the letter out loud in front of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade, Serbia on December 10, 2019 at the very moment that Handke was receiving his prize in Stockholm, Sweden.