Perceptions

The part of the FAMA Collection on the period of the Siege of Sarajevo (1992-1996) contains the Oral History (1,096 video interviews), the "Surveys Questionnaire" project, with 4,637 surveys/responses from Sarajevo citizens, the "Sarajevo Life Magazine" project with interviews with 81 artists and intellectuals, and a photo archive. The testimonies of Sarajevo citizens who experienced the siege have thus remained permanently archived for the needs of future academic and media research and for the transfer of knowledge about this period to current and new generations of young people.

Using different formats of materials from the time of the siege produced immediately after it and materials that were created 30 years after the siege, we designed the Macro Story format. Each Macro Story combines content from the FAMA Collection on a specific topic such as water, food, culture, art, hospitals, reading, entertainment, sports... talking about the phenomenon of survival in those conditions.

During 2024 and 2025, there was a need to put archival materials from the FAMA Collection against the new contents of the modern disturbing world. This is how PERCEPTIONS were created, which answer the question of how BiH society, as well as the world we live in, has changed in the past 30 years, since the end of the siege of Sarajevo. We wanted to find out HOW IT WAS ONCE, and HOW IT IS NOW. How do we remember the siege period? Has society managed to overcome war traumas or have they remained permanently woven into the social fabric? Were opportunities for improvement and mental healing taken? The answers to these questions were again given by the citizens of Sarajevo, whose statements and photos from the period of the siege are already stored in the FAMA Collection.