Workshop on the Facing Srebrenica Archives Project
The University of Amsterdam (UvA) hosted the closing workshop of the Facing Srebrenica collective, participatory archiving project (FSP), a joint research initiative led by the Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational and European Studies. The project was realized in cooperation with the Netherlands Institute for Military History (NIMH), the Netherlands Defense Academy, and the Srebrenica Memorial Center (SMC), under a grant scheme sponsored by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). The Archivum was represented by Csaba Szilágyi, who was invited as an archival expert and former consultant to the SMC to evaluate and comment on the outcome of the project. The event involved researchers and information specialists from the FSP, archivists, digital curators, anthropologists, and cultural historians.
The FSP intended to reconsider questions on the visual and transnational memory of the Srebrenica genocide in the Netherlands and Bosnia and Herzegovina by collecting, archiving and digitizing personal photographs from veterans of Dutchbat 3, a battalion mandated to ensure that no military activities were carried out in the ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica in January–July 1995. It further aimed to describe and contextualize them with the help of the veterans themselves, and the community of survivors and families of victims. While researchers from the UvA and collection managers from the NIMH coordinated the processing work with the former, archivists and curators from the SMC, survivors of the genocide themselves, reached out to the latter to identify local people, sites and events featured in the photos. As a result, over forty photo collections (ca. 11k photographs) were deposited with the archives of the NIMH, eight collections were annotated by the two target groups, and over 3k digital photos were distributed to survivors, which led to the identification of over 280 Bosniaks.
Szilágyi addressed issues related to participatory archiving—one of the main topics of the workshop—including the agency of community catalogers and their emotional engagement with the photos. Methodological challenges and practical difficulties encountered throughout the process were also thoroughly elaborated. Experiences, conclusions, and possible directions for developing a follow-up project will be summarized in subsequent scholarly articles.
