In 1995, the UN-imposed "Dayton Agreement" ended the armed conflict in Bosnia & Herzegovina. The agreement created a territorial division between two entities within the state. On one side, the Federation of Bosnia, inhabited by a majority of Muslims and Croats, and on the other side the Republika Srpska, inhabited by a majority of Bosnian Serbs.

The Dayton Agreement was intended to protect Bosnia & Herzegovina's own state sovereignty and prevent nationalist tensions in the country. Instead, almost 30 years after the end of the war, the country seems to experience a counter-history of its own past.

The re-construction of the new/old national identity in the “Republika Srpska” relates to the national identity of Serbia and the negation of war crimes and genocide in Srebrenica (1995) after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The central national narrative of “Republika Srpska” is based on an induced amnesia of the Srebrenica genocide. Perpetrators are heroized and thousands of anonymous mass graves are still undiscovered.

»We think the past differently« explores the political and social landscape of the Bosnian post-war society and surveys ideological mechanisms which result in a collective amnesia. Mechanisms such as racialization and hegemonic nationalism are used to systematically change and distort the country’s past. These mechanisms generate silence and in connection with the un-reflected genocides of the past and continue to serve the current discourses of discrimination and exclusion.

The ongoing research project combines found footage, archive material and photographs of present events to trace the history of the Bosnian past and to map the roots of genocidal events in Bosnia from World War II to the Yugoslavian Wars that are disconnected from present historical narratives, in order to uncover the hidden conflicts of structural violence in the present.