Presentations & open discussion What do we remember to forget?

Participating: Krater

9.30-10.15
What circulates most readily from the siege of Sarajevo is its cultural archive — Sontag staging Godot, the film festival, magazines, and posters. Under conditions designed to annihilate a city, the insistence on cultural life carried a particular weight: an assertion of continued civic existence against the fact of being killed everyday. Yet the repeated return to this archive functions less as commemoration than a credentialing — evidence of Sarajevo’s legibility within a white European cultural frame, its proximity to the particular idea of civilization. Such framing displaces siege itself — the numbers, the infrastructure of encirclement, the daily mechanics of survival, the political and military operations that produced and sustained the conditions. This talk returns to those obscured facts, particularly in the context of neighboring Slovenia.

Hana Ćurak is a Berlin and Sarajevo based anthropologist, cultural researcher and writer. She works at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Zurich, researching collectivity, futurity and curatorial practices associated with the (post-) Yugoslav context. She works with curators and artists from the region. She used to work in diplomacy.

10.15-11.45
Re-assembling from Limbo is a session that explores how creative tools can be used to articulate ideas, positions, and conflict under conditions of political and social tension. The session begins with a short guided meditative practice designed to attune participants to a reflective, liminal state, followed by an interactive exchange of lived and anecdotal experiences of encounters with “the other” across differing worldviews. Drawing on dialogue-based and game-inspired approaches, participants collectively explore strategies for navigating disagreement and misunderstanding.

Patrick Nii Okanta Ankrah is a curator, artist and cultural practitioner working at the intersection of contemporary art, and decolonial spatial practices, with an interpersonal, interdisciplinary, spiritual, and intra-geographic approach. He uses universal elements like love, care, and sharing as starting and end points of co-creation endeavours, often framing exhibitions as experimental platforms for social reflection and critique. He’s a part of blaxTARLINES collective and part of curatorial programming at SCCA Tamale.

11.45-12.30
The spatial practices are dominantly seen as solution providers − offering stable and clear responses to demands of the building industry and the dynamics of the global market. This situation is resulting in simplifying and undermining the overall capacity of architectural creative thinking and its imaginative force. On the other hand, the university education and academic research, as cultivators of critical creative thought, often seem distant and detached from these issues. The profession is found strained in polarization and contradiction. Nevertheless, recent attempts in academia, including the student movement in Serbia (2024-), are challenging this opposition while raising the question − are, at this time, the imaginative force and the creative act considered as a radical practice?

Anđelka Bnin-Bninski, PhD is an architect engineer with specializations in theory of arts and media (University of Arts, Belgrade) and architectural philosophy (ENSA Paris-La Villette, Paris). She works as educator, curator and trans- and inter-disciplinary researcher, affiliated with the University of Belgrade − Faculty of Architecture and associated with laboratory Gerphau in Paris. She holds experience as a practicing architect, has collaborations with the independent artistic scene in Belgrade and she is engaged in multiple international design-driven initiatives. Her current investigations are focused on critical research tactics in practice, restoration projects and stone carving. She is coordinator for the ARENA architectural research network.

Organised by Krater, Festivities Under Siege (20-22.5.2026). Krater is an emerging production space for transdisciplinary practices, which sprouted from the neglected, crater-resembling construction site near the city center of Ljubljana. By exploring the potential for world-making projects on the lands of anthropogenic ruins, Krater acts as the situated prototype of a terraforming agency. Site-specific production stations (papermaking workshop, wood workshop & myco-design lab) which consist of open access, ever-evolving workshop spaces, are set to create a dialogue with the impoverished crust of earth colonised with invasive and other feral plants.

More info: https://krater.si/en/projekti/festivites-under-siege

LJUBLJANA ART WEEKEND