In August 1993, Cornelia Suhan travelled to Bosnia for the first time to help establish a therapy centre in Tuzla for women who had been raped. She would return every year, missing only the year her daughter was born, and in 2018 she began taking photographs.
“I kept passing the buildings where the crimes had been committed during my stays in Bosnia. They are scattered throughout the country, in places that seem completely innocuous: on a rural road, in a village street, on the grounds of a factory, on the site of an agricultural cooperative, in a residential area of a city, or on school grounds... Abandoned, these buildings were simply there; nothing indicated the crimes that had taken place there. The dead walls of the houses stared back at me.”
From 2019 onwards, Suhan began researching these sites more systematically in order to document war crimes in different regions of the country. Nowhere did she find plaques on the buildings commemorating the crimes or paying tribute to the survivors or to the women who were murdered in the context of wartime rape.
“All of this stayed with me, because to me the buildings seemed to maintain a connection with the events of the war that had preceded them, as silent witnesses, whether they had been renovated, abandoned, reoccupied, or returned to their original function. I noticed how some houses remained abandoned after the war; to me, they seemed like the ‘untouchables’, while all traces had been erased from others.”
The book contains nearly 90 images depicting some of the buildings where these crimes were committed: schools and sports halls, hospitals and police stations, garages, apartment buildings, hotels and spas, mills, factories, canteens, bus stations, army headquarters, prisons, museums, and mosques. The buildings are visible, but what happened inside them is not. Suhan’s documentation of these sites allows for an objective presentation while conveying information and evidence that can help us begin to perceive and attempt to understand the enormity and scale of the crimes committed against women during this period.
“The buildings and places depicted in the photographs provide an opportunity for a process of remembrance and commemoration. They speak to us in a different way from how the women themselves can speak. These places, these houses, as ‘speaking objects’, impose upon us images that are difficult to bear and that unsettle our habitual perception. They allow us to comprehend spaces of experience that we ‘normally’ keep carefully separated from everyday life and deal with through shame, silence, or concealment. When the event is witnessed and spoken of, we challenge its taboo.” — Verena Bruchhagen