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Carlo Scarpa Prize

The Jury of the International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens has decided unanimously to dedicate the XXV annual award to Osmače and Brežani, two villages in eastern Bosnia.

We are on the plateau above Srebrenica, a place where the landscape is furrowed by watercourses and wrinkled like a walnut, enclosed by the deep cut gullies of a big loop of the Drina, a river which has played a crucial role in European history and culture, at once separating and connecting major civilizations in the Balkans; an area that inevitably prompts one to reflect on the contradiction between the beauty of nature and the still omnipresent signs of war.

Osmače and Brežani together comprise one of the many places in Bosnia and Herzegovina where, two decades ago, the life was torn from a community, its long-established tradition of living together in a multi-cultural environment was destroyed and those who survived were dispersed. What makes these villages a witness to a supremely significant experience is the presence of a small group of families, farmers and stockbreeders, who for some years have been trying to find the road back to the texture of the life they remember, to construct new relationships between people, to renew the necessary ties binding space to be occupied, land to be tended, houses to be rebuilt, human dignity to be recovered.

Before the “troubles”, in 1991, Osmače had 942 inhabitants and Brežani 273. No-one lived there from 1993 to 2002. Today around a hundred people live in the districts comprising Osmače: Mahale, Hadrovići, Sedlari, Podstran, Prisoje, Mursalovići and Sećimići; and several families live in Primilac, Posolila, Gajić or Turija, all parts of the adjoining village of Brežani.

The role the International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens aims to play in an immense framework of reflection and action, the contribution it wishes to make, lies in trying to achieve a more intimate understanding, and in ensuring wider awareness of the profound reasons that bind individuals or families or small community groupings to the place inhabited by their memories and informed with their plans. Reasons and ties that are so strong that, as demonstrated by the case of Osmače and Brežani, they can confront chasms that appear unassailable. Dialogue with those involved and their direct testimony help us to see the most suitable ways and the most useful equipment for taking on the care of the physical environment, starting with the task of working the ground; they also provide insights into what life is really like in an area in which the recent upheavals are the latest painful layer in the interminable series of geopolitical metamorphoses laid down throughout history and in the broad context of Euro-Mediterranean geography.

This place, these events, help us to understand the sense and the value of an experiment which is small in scale in socio-economic terms but of outstanding importance as a supremely civilized and tellingly symbolic example of the widespread phenomenon of the “return to the land”. More immediately, they raise the urgent question of how best to construct a multi-cultural space, proceeding not from the distribution of places to the different elements but from a vision in which the different, together, inhabit a unitary place. The Jury has decided to entrust the Carlo Scarpa seal to two of the leading figures in this process, representatives and witnesses of their communities, their cultures and their villages – Muhamed Avdić and Velibor Rankić. In so doing, the Jury expresses its affectionate affinity and encouragement, reiterates its commitment to comprehend and communicate the difficulties and hopes that underlie their endeavours and thanks them for the life-enhancing lesson, as topical as it is universal, that comes from their tenacious resolve on the plateau above Srebrenica.