In August 1993 Cornelia Suhan went to Bosnia for the first time to help establish a therapy centre in Tuzla for women who had been raped. She was to return every year—missing only the year of the birth of her daughter—and in 2018 she began to take photographs.
‘I kept driving past buildings where the crimes had been committed during my stays in Bosnia. They are scattered all over the national territory somewhere completely innocuous on a country road, on a village street, on the grounds of a factory, the grounds of an agricultural cooperative, in a residential area in the city or on school grounds….Abandoned, these buildings lay there; nothing indicated the crimes committed there anymore, dead walls of houses stared at me.’
Suhan began researching the sites more systematically from 2019 onwards in order to document war crimes in different regions throughout the national territory. Nowhere did she discover plaques on the buildings commemorating the crimes or paying tribute to the survivors nor the women murdered in the context of war rape.
‘All this stayed with me, because for me the buildings seemed to maintain a connection to the former events of the war like silent witnesses, whether renovated, abandoned, reoccupied or revived in their original function. I noticed how some houses still stood abandoned after the war; to me they seemed like the ‘untouchables,’ while in others all traces had been removed.’
The book includes nearly 90 images showing some of the buildings where the crimes were committed—from schools and sports halls, to hospitals and police headquarters, garages, apartment buildings, hotels and spas, mills, factories, canteens, bus stations, army headquarters, prisons, museums and mosques. The building are visible, but not what happened within. Suhan’s documentation of the buildings enables a factual presentation and conveys information and evidence to both begin to perceive and attempt to understand the enormity and scale of the crimes against women during this period.
‘The buildings and places represented in the photographs are an occasion for a process of remembrance and commemoration. They speak to us in a different way than the women (can) do
themselves. They—these places, these houses—as ‘talking objects’ impose on us images that are difficult to bear and that shake up our usual perception. They enable insights into (experience) spaces that we ‘normally’ isolate well in everyday life and manage with shame, silence or concealment. If the event is witnessed and brought up, we challenge its tabooing’ - Verena Bruchhagen
