Bookstan International Literature Festival this year's visual identity, the design which is signed by Dino Hujić. The theme of this year's festival is "Zarjavele trobente", and below are the words of Lamija Milišić, the Executive Director of the BOOKSTAN festival.
This year's festival will be held from July 3 to 6 in Sarajevo
Loud trumpets with their music, / to wake her up, to wake her up. - regardless of whether you pronounce these words in rhythm or you are completely unfamiliar with the song in question by the band Kongres (performed by Zoran Predin), its rusty trumpets, messengers from the past, we ask the central questions of the ninth edition of the Bookstan International Literature Festival: What kind of narratives have the power to become cultural heritage? In what way do literary voices echo their own generation, but transcend the spirit of their time into an ideal that is not selfishly, nostalgically tied to one time and place, but laden with truth for generations to come? What about the narratives that remain imprisoned in their generation - what meaning do they have beyond it?
Once again, the context of the Sarajevo space in which Bookstan takes place, neither in the East nor in the West, is important in shaping our worldview, reading the narrative from a perspective of the labyrinthine topography, which, due to the painfully cut borders of stereotypes and the historical burden of our society, nevertheless gives a unique perspective. Similar to that of the cubist city that Trieste is described by Claudio Magris. Our cubist city of Sarajevo is stable despite strong divisions between generations marked by different social regimes, war experiences and cultural rebellions. These cuts are also echoed in the words of Miljenko Jergović, precisely about the song "Zarjavele trobente": Such songs, neither guilty nor owed, stand on the borders of worlds: on the one hand there are those who remember, and they are usually unbearably sad, on the other hand they who do not remember, who forgot or were not even born yet.
Adhering to Magris's words that historical reality must never be mystified by rhetorical claims, at the Bookstan festival in 2024 we invite you to consider the significance of the choice between being victims imprisoned in the fate of a historical era and being survivors, who try to tell new generations about the duplicity of the bestial and of the noble race of man.
Lamija Milišić, Executive Director of the BOOKSTAN Festival
Comments