In Osmace and Brežani, two villages in Podrinje, a region of eastern Bosnia, on the border with Serbia, the jury of the Carlo Scarpa International Prize for Gardens unanimously decided to dedicate the 2014th edition, 1990, to the study and care aimed at a place particularly dense with the values of nature, memory and invention, promoted and organized every year since XNUMX by the Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche.
We are on the plateau above Srebrenica, a territory dug by the waters, squeezed into the deep gullies of a large bend in the Drina. It is a place in front of which it is inevitable to wonder about the contradiction between the beauty of nature and the omnipresent signs of a still legible war, one of the many places in Bosnia from which the life of a community was torn two decades ago, its long-lasting multicultural coexistence, the survivors dispersed. Among the latter, and this makes it a case of highly significant testimony and experience, a small nucleus of families has been trying for some years to find their way back, the plot of memory, new relationships between people, spaces to live in, lands to care, houses to rebuild, the human condition to conquer.
“Before the tear”, in 1991, Osmace had 942 inhabitants and Brežani 273. No one lived there from 1993 to 2002. Today about a hundred people live in the villages of Osmace and only a few families live in the villages of the adjoining village of Brežani. The way back was taken in the early 2010s. About ten families, real pioneer species, take the decisive step, the return to the villages of the plateau, to restore and take care of the land of the fathers and mothers. In XNUMX the buckwheat experiment was launched in Osmace, born from the exchange of knowledge and practices with technicians from various countries, primarily Italy. The small steps of the return have found in their itinerary solidarity born over the years and in unspeakable facts, and never extinguished: the Alexander Langer Foundation, the Peace Center of the Municipality of Venice, the Historical Archive of Bolzano, Agronomists without Borders of Padua, the Cooperative agricultural El Tamiso, the Association of Cooperation and Solidarity Italy, the Tavola Valdese.
Il Carlo Scarpa Award fits into this framework of initiatives, with an attempt to understand more closely, and with the commitment to make known a little better, the profound reasons that bind individuals or communities to the place inhabited by their memories and their intentions, reasons and ties so strong as to make it possible to face an abyss that appears insurmountable.
The Award campaign will reach its peak in Treviso on the days of Friday 9 and Saturday 10 May, with the inauguration of an exhibition, a public seminar of reflections, the publication of a dossier dedicated to Osmace and Brežani and the ceremony of delivery to the site managers of the seal designed by Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978).
Public conference dedicated to the first twenty-five years of the Carlo Scarpa Prize and inauguration of the exhibition of the XXV edition Friday 9 May 2014, at 18 pm
the exhibition will remain open until Sunday 29 June 2014
from Tuesday to Friday 15-20, Saturday and Sunday 10-20
Treviso, Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche, Bomben spaces
2014 Prize-nominated venue seminar
Saturday 10 May 2014, from 9.30 to 13.30
Treviso, Benetton Studies and Research Foundation, Bomben spaces auditorium
public award ceremony of the 2014 Prize
Saturday 10 May 2014, from 17 to 19
Treviso, Municipal Theater, corso del Popolo 31
information
Benetton Research Studies Foundation, via Cornarotta 7-9, 31100 Treviso
tel. +39.0422.5121, fax +39.0422.579483, fbsr@fbsr.it, www.fbsr.it
Attachments: 3_motivation of the jury.doc
