Interview with Dunja Krvavac

Days of Architecture Sarajevo

Dunja Krvavac is a member of LIFT – Spatial Initiatives, a non-profit non-governmental organisation that aims to educate local communities on architecture, urbanism and design. She started as a volunteer in 2016 and moved on to become a design team leader in 2019 and project coordinator of LIFT’s biggest project, the biennial festival Days of Architecture Sarajevo and its complementary project Nights of Architecture in 2020. She has continued exploring the topic of Sarajevo public spaces through the joint Days of Architecture and LINA European architecture platform project (UN)CONTEXT Dissecting the layers: Sarajevo residency workshop.

What’s it like to work as a young female architect in Sarajevo?

It has its ups and downs, like everywhere in the world, you have different challenges. Maybe Sarajevo is a bit more specific in terms that is a still a very traditional and patriarchal community. The world of architecture here is full of men, so many men. Going through this field of old white men can sometimes be a little challenging. I think that we all have to take small steps, we all have to be focused on what we want to do and how we want to achieve it.

I love working in Sarajevo, I love being here, I was born here, I was raised here, I’ve been living here for thirty years and have no desire to live anywhere else. I think this is a beautiful canvas that still has to be painted with a lot of things. And staying here is a decision I made. Most of the contributions that I can make into this world are going to be connected to Sarajevo. But trying to be an architect here… I mean it’s a cliché to say it like this, that I’m a girl and this is a profession full of men, but it happens a lot even today that you’re walking through a construction site where you have a bunch of men not taking you seriously because you’re a girl. I don’t want to be negative, I’m very privileged as I have a wonderful job, opportunities and a community of people who support me, but we still have to unite in order to make this city better after all it went through in the 1990s.

The Balkans Wars from the 1990s are almost forgotten in Europe. There was even a claim in Germany that the war in Ukraine is the first war in Europe since the Second World War. Can you talk about that, and also how capital intervened and defined Bosnia and Herzegovina after the 1990s?

In Europe people might have forgotten about the Balkan War in the 1990s, but here it’s still very much present. I was born in the first year of the war, in 1992. And maybe it’s good fortune that I don’t remember the war. Unfortunately, due to the way that the county functions and works, we are reminded of it every day. I – like most of my generation – have this inherited trauma. This situation of the country being in transition and the huge amount of capital flow in the late 1990s, beginning of the 2000s and even now, changed the city and its architecture completely. It became a capital-focused architecture. We used to have a wonderful, developing city before the war, where people were eager to build the city by building schools, museum, galleries, community centres, cultural centres and so on, and today everything is focused on capital and investments. There is a small amount of planning done, people just grab opportunities to earn a lot of money when they can. Unfortunately, that’s the general atmosphere now. It changed so much from the socialist system transitioning to capitalism, I think we as a society still struggle to understand what the position of an architect is in this situation and context. There are a lot of people trying to be respectful towards the city and its architecture, but in the end 90% of all these efforts fail because of the pressures of investment and politics, which are all that matters to some people. It sounds a bit gloomy when I say all this, it sounds like there’s no hope, but I’m an incurable optimist that things can be better. You need to make small steps and giving up is not an option.

What did the capital coming from the Middle East do to the city?

This influx of Middle-Eastern capital is a very difficult topic to talk about. There are a lot foreigners coming here, and they want to build, invest and sometimes even live here. That’s not an issue for me if people want to invest, I don’t mind that. But what I do mind is the attitude that Bosnia and Herzegovina has taken when it comes to this or any type of investor – we have this small county attitude that we just let foreign investors do whatever they want. We are so scared that everything will fall apart if we don’ let them to do everything they want. Now we have these situations where investors are destroying most of our Olympic mountains with help of the locals. They are building huge settlements and gated neighbourhoods on our mountains and the worst thing about this is that they don’t really care about our traditions, customs, local experiences. And we are doing nothing about it.

You are in the position of being able to travel a lot. How does that influence your work?

It’s a huge benefit for me that my work is connected to traveling. I discussed this with my best friend and partner in crime Irhana Šehović, how we need to travel with our work, to meet new people in order to bring new perspectives into Sarajevo. When you are in the city for too long sometimes you have this tendency to overlook some things. You are constantly bombarded with local information that you don’t filter it in a correct way. Traveling enables you to connect with amazing people with new perspectives. Through LINA and other projects that we are involved in, we are making Bosnia visible again. We were visible before, we used to be an amazing county and then that horrible episode of the 1990s happened and we went some steps back. I think that everything that we try to do here is a step forward to become better. There’s no point in giving up.

What does a responsible building mean?

It’s a difficult question from many aspects, there’s an architectural answer to that and there is a human answer as well. Architects are very self-centred, sometimes they – we – make buildings that are more about the architecture and the architect and less made for the community that is going to use them.
I think that responsible architecture and responsible building is when you put aside what the architecture and the architects are. That’s almost not important, I always see architects as mediators. I can see space in a different way than someone else can, and I quickly try to organize it. But there is an entire community that needs to use this space. It would be very narcissistic of me as an architect to say that this is an amazing building that I made, and completely disregard that this building is going to be a crucial part of someone’s life. If I design something it always has to be focused on the person using it. Myself as an architect – I am irrelevant and not important. The only thing that is important are the people who are going to use the architecture. If you don’t build for the community, if you don’t interact with the community, and if you don’t put the community first as a part of your design process, then it makes no sense.

Tell me more about the Days of Architecture and other projects that you are involved in?

Days of Architecture is a very important project, and one that I’ve been working on for almost nine years now. It’s an important part of the city, and the process of regenerating it after the war and transition. We celebrated 15 years of Days of Architecture this year. It’s thought of as a festival, but in fact is so much more. During the festival we gather local and international experts to discuss important topics. It’s a place where we can research and introduce new perspectives into our local communities, as the festival is very much connected to Sarajevo. During my presentations and lectures I say “Sarajevo is our playground” to research and experiment with what might the city might become in the future. I’m proud that we have managed to stay relevant in the city for 15 years. We’re not supported by the state, so we’re trying to move forward to the best of our capabilities. And I enjoy being involved in different activist projects like the Open Air Cinema Prvi Maj, which I’m working on right now with an amazing interdisciplinary team.

What will architecture look like in the future?

I ask myself this question all the time. There are so many things happening right now, from war in Ukraine to this horrible apartheid that is happening in Israel and Palestine. These situations make you wonder what is the future of architecture, what is the future of the world? We have to change the way we think, we have to unlearn some things and question everything that we know. We need to be honest and very transparent. Architecture is the slowest changing profession in the world, and we are still doing things very traditionally. Can we change anything if we keep working within the same frameworks? Having architecture for the sake of building – that’s not the future. Focusing on communities, programmes, systems – things we can change – is the most important thing at the moment. We need to take stronger stands on many issues that are happening around us.