Narrating Ars Aevi: re-envisioning and re-shaping the Contemporary Art Museum of Sarajevo in the urban space

Sarajevo, April 1992: within the precariousness of the besieged city under constant shelling, a group of Bosnian artists and intellectuals activated the process of 'museogenesis', namely, the adoption of a museological framework. They thus conceived a contemporary art museum for the devastated and wounded city. A museum that – according to the founder’s words – represented a civil revenge with the “peaceful weapon of culture”, a place where well-renowned contemporary artists were being invited to express their protest against the siege and the general abandonment of the city. Hence, a grassroots initiative born in the context of community bounding and cultural resistance, with the aim of safeguarding the endangered identity of Sarajevo, here intended as a cultural and artistic capital. Even though the Ars Aevi Museum has never been realized, the longstanding, fluid and open-ended museum project has been surviving over years. The museum typology has been thus reimagined and reshaped in the founders’ minds and influenced by the different historical and geopolitical contexts in which the Project operated, or by those social actors who interacted and cooperated. The Project itself has assumed different narratives, it has aspired to diverse purposes from time to time, and it renovated many times its strategies and plans. In more than two decades of activities, it has assembled a valuable art collection through a donation-based partnership with European art museums and institutions. The hundreds of artworks forming the collection are still kept inside a ‘temporary’ purpose-built exhibition space, in Sarajevo. The interpretation I chose for the reconstruction of the history and development of the Project focuses on how the museum has been envisioned, rethought and reshaped over the years, and therefore continuously projected into the future, both in terms of formal transformations, and shifts of meaning, which means through the identification of the different museum typologies that have been considered throughout the two decades. That reading permitted to illustrate all the museum typologies, comparing them to the theoretical reference models, hence to highlight their narrative details, their symbolic charge, and when possible even technical and managerial aspects. It provided the different points of view to understand the not-realization of the museum and the current situation of the Project. Hence, it facilitated the discussion of the working hypothesis on which the present thesis stands: may the Ars Aevi Museum be rethought and reshaped once again?