Entering the virtual world of Sarajevo

Printer-friendly versionSend by email

Have you been in the Museum of the siege of Sarajevo? Of course not, because it will be built in several years on Marijin Dvor, in the park Hastahana.

Nevertheless, you can get preview and visit collection’s website - famacollection.org.

This year, on the Sarajevo Liberation Day, April 6, a virtual museum of the siege of Sarajevo - Art of Living 1992 - 1996, FAMA Collection, has been opened.

Virtual FAMA collection represents the largest collection of the projects on the siege of Sarajevo made in the last 20 years, presented with the latest technology (3D mapping).

The collection contains over a thousand of interviews with about 450 people from Sarajevo, a survey on the survival in Sarajevo, over ten thousand of text messages related to events from 1992 to 1996 in Sarajevo.
The collection also includes video materials related to the siege of Sarajevo, and over three thousand of visual data (photographs, drawings, animations, detailed maps, illustrations) and other data that are part of life and survival during all the years of the siege of capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

So, the Museum of the siege of Sarajevo this way provides educational material for coping with challenges of the 21st century and is available to everyone through new media and the Internet.

Although creation of the virtual collection lasted some 20, the cycle is not yet complete. The entire collection is to be interactive, where all citizens of Sarajevo who survived the siege will be able to share their stories and experiences.

FAMA project consortium comprises of International Theatre Festival MESS, FAMA International, Education Builds BiH and the Youth Initiative for Human Rights.

The museum building will be built in the coming years in the park Hastahana and FAMA collection will be donated to the Museum by the FAMA team, current owner of the collection.

As a virtual bank of knowledge, collection is intended to overcome digital divide between the culture of memory and search for knowledge in real time.

Conceptual creator of the Museum of the siege of Sarajevo was Suada Kapić who initiated FAMA project Survival Art Museum in 1992. She believes that the museum is of great importance today when the 21st century witnessed the sufferings of people in natural disasters or caused by the human hand.

"This knowledge, which we call the knowledge bank, says that in four years we lived in terror developed on several levels, aimed at forcing us to give up, but we haven’t given up and thus we proved that we are the winners of this situation. This is the victory of human nature and human mind, and we showed that we were the creators of a new civilization that emerged from these cultural values," said Kapić.

FAMA collection is also active on a social networks Facebook and Twitter.