In Ruins

Abstract

In July 2012, survivors of a Bosnian War–era concentration camp and killing ground at the Omarska mine declared one of the landmarks of London’s newly constructed Olympic Park a “Memorial in Exile,” standing in for the memorial for which they had been unsuccessfully advocating at the site of their imprisonment and abuse.1 Their declaration opens to reconsideration some of the predominant ways in which architecture, memory, and violence are understood. Before the war, Omarska was part of a state-owned mining complex near the city of Prijedor. In May 1992, during mass violence in and around Prijedor, Bosnian Serb forces transformed Omarska into a camp for people expelled from the city and nearby towns and villages. When the camp was closed three months later, in response to international media pressure, an estimated 3,334 people had been held captive there, and between 700 and 800 of those prisoners had been killed.2 People were not only imprisoned and killed in Omarska; the camp also functioned as a site for the formation of political subjects. Just as the factory was a space where the modern industrialized worker was made, the mine’s functional ruin at Omarska yielded a space where citizens of socialist Yugoslavia were remade as subaltern ethnic communities of Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats.3 Ethnicity, in other words, was not only a social construction; it was also conjoined to the architectural reconstruction of a mine into a camp. After the war, in the partition of Bosnia, Omarska was included in the Republika Srpska, a political entity whose government has refused to acknowledge both the violence that took place at Omarska and the Bosnian genocide more generally. The war continued, in other words, not least by explicit denial of its violence and implicit acceptance of its results. Postwar reconstruction has extended the …