Publisher's Synopsis
Sarajevo Singular Plural offers a collection of contributions-essays as well as art and photography portfolios-focusing on Sarajevo as a 'multiplex city'. The book screens how 'being with'-at one and the same time co-existence, exposure to each other and hybridisation-is translated into the permanent metamorphosis of a city merging its past and its future. Sarajevo's recent past contains tragedies, suffering and failures of humanity as well as much unrealised hope and potential. The art and photography portfolios attempt in particular to capture this in delicate and refined ways. The book scrutinises Sarajevo's urban space from a diversity of standpoints, combining approaches inspired by architecture, urbanism, literature, art, anthropology, history, philosophy, the social sciences and politics. Sarajevo Singular Plural views the city as ceaselessly active and perpetually changing; it presupposes a multidimensional and collaborative system composed of highly reactive projects connecting a wide range of 'drivers for change'. This volume should not be regarded as a closed and completed whole, a form deposited once and for all, or a totality. It amounts rather to an open site, inviting a further combination of the different contributions, which may be conceived as fragments that elicit different readings of the urban space over time.
