“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
"• Søren Kierkegaard
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”
"• T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems
The 1984 Winter Olympics, known as the “XIV Olympic Winter Games”, was a winter sports event held in the city of Sarajevo, then a part of Yugoslavia. Sarajevo (now the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina) was selected beating Sapporo and Gothenburg in the bidding process. The 1984 Winter Olympics were also the 2nd Olympics organized in a communist state; the first one being the 1980 Summer Games, which took place in Moscow.
Yugoslavia was by that time one of the most prosperous and stable communist countries, and Sarajevo a symbol of friendship and tolerance between the different ethnic groups living in the region. But only eight years later everything changed...the brutal fighting over the recently independent countries following the collapse of Yugoslavia began.
There is still a lot of evidence of the war, especially in Sarajevo where the city was under siege for almost four years and is still full of bullet holes in the buildings.
The ruins of the Olympic venues can still be seen in the mountains surrounding the city: the concrete luge and bobsleigh track on Trebeviā‡ mountain, (used during the war as a Serbian artillery position) the ski jumping and Nordic races site on Igman mountain, a couple of run-down hotels and restaurants, a cable cart... even a building used by the UN during the conflict, near the ski site.
The two events (the Olympics and the war) are still very present in Sarajevo, physically and culturally. The legacies of the Games and the war create conflicted memories. They are a living reminder of that went on here.
The ruins of the Olympic venues, dead carcasses devoured silently by the wild forest, are a metaphor of times that are long gone, memories of a country that doesn’t exist any more. The crumbling concrete structures are the crumbling ruins of the old country.
To photograph a place that was photographed many times, I knew I had to do it in a different way, so I chose to shoot after sunset, almost in the night, sometimes with the aid of a small portable light, to help create the mood of loneliness of these ruins emerging from the overgrown nature on the green hills of Bosnia, to better convey the feeling of nostalgia.
Pablo H. Caridad
