Cheth Rowe and Andrea Matulich-Rowe

Bio

I am a senior in the New Genres BFA program exploring performance and sound as programming languages. Another line of investigation, a musical gift made to the war widowed women of Sarajevo, led to this photo.

Statement

The long downhill slide from Sarajevo to the forebodingly named Split is peppered with roadside entrepreneurs, mostly women, whose makeshift stands frequently feature exquisite local honey. Theirs is a sweet, improvised architecture of self-reliant capitalism, a hopeful answer to the puzzle of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). These small businesspeople are rightfully applauded, but the economy of a country needs more; just outside the city limits is the answer finally offered by the West. Colonialism's roadside architecture doesn't need to sell, it simply squats, advertising the caffeinated, corn syrup sweetness of Coca-Cola (TM). The billboard poses the still unanswered question, how do we solve BiH? Placed next to the coke plant it also answers its own question: all we need is to sell our allegiances to the capital influx of transnationals.

Were there fewer mosques in Sarajevo perhaps the West would have intervened earlier, before the siege had reached a thousand days. One country that did aid Sarajevo during the siege is our axis-of-evil enemy, Iran. Its architectural offering is inspiring, cosmopolitan, and downtown: the new Iranian embassy poised stately on the East bank of the Miljacka.

Allegiances are, one would hope, based on more that architectural style. Regardless, the allegiances in Sarajevo matter: World War I began here; the final major war of the Twentieth Century consumed the fiction of European unity here. And today, when war with Iran seems increasingly likely, it is sobering to consider that Sarajevo remains perfectly placed to, once again, spark with world-stage significance.