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(Re)Addressing Mostar: Global imaginaries, local activisms

This article engages critically with Roy and Ong’s concept of ‘worlding’ (2011) to focus on how artistic interventions in public space become worlding practices that attempt to challenge established, global representations of cities. The essay focuses on the case of Mostar, an ethnically divided city in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in order to discuss how the globally emerging representation of this city as intolerant, uncooperative, and hopeless shapes current understandings of what the city can and cannot become in relation to overcoming persisting ethnic polarisation. The globalised discursive production of Mostar as a place of permanent deadlock caused by the ethnic conflict is then contrasted to the worlding practice of Abart, a local platform of cultural activists whose site-specific art performances in public space aim to initiate alternative forms of knowledge production that expose the limits of the ‘divided-city’ label and make visible moments of cooperation, solidarity, and consensus among supposedly-conflicting actors. Through a mobilisation of critical urban theories, particularly that of Henri Lefebvre’s notion of heterotopia , this essay therefore attends to the ways in which Abart navigates global funding streams from various international organisations through the re-appropriation of donors’ vocabulary as a means of countering their normative narratives that limit the very potentials of urban activism. Thus, Mostar’s network of activists and performers constitutes a significant example of grassroots actors critically intervening into the ‘art of being global’.