Sarajevo come paesaggio simbolico

An urban landscape can be read as a symbolic landscape from many distinct viewpoints: because it reflects the local urban culture; because it is never politically “neutral”, since monuments are usually erected in order to commemorate a given set of ethno-historical facts and heroes; and also because, as a “landscape of the mind”, it can be charged with a symbolic meaning in itself. In all of these three different perspectives, Sarajevo symbolic landscape has been shaped and reshaped many times along history, and it is now under reconstruction again. Built up as a ”cultural landscape” in the Ottoman period, it was redesigned as a “political landscape” by the Austrian domination, and re-invented as a “landscape of the mind” in the Yugoslav period. During the war of the nineties, the city has been purposefully destroyed as a place of multicultural encounter, becoming the object of a deliberated act of urbicide; as such, it has been re-interpreted and visually represented as the global icon of the city-martyr, the symbol of how culture and art can overcome ethnic hate and violence. Post-Dayton Sarajevo is again the centre of many projects of reconstruction, more or less explicitly aimed at leaving a mark on its new symbolic landscape.