Reclaiming dita

LARISA KURTOVIĆ

Larisa Kurtović is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Ottawa. She is a political anthropologist who conducts research on activist politics, postsocialist transformation, and the aftermath of international intervention in postwar Bosnia. Her research and publications explore the ways in which historical experience, including that of socialism and postsocialist “transition,” comes to shape both the ongoing political struggles and emergent forms of political imagination. In addition to working on this graphic ethnography with Andrew Gilbert and Boris Stapić, she is currently writing a book entitled Future as Predicament: Political Life After Catastrophe based on her long-term research in postwar-Bosnia.

ANDREW GILBERT

Andrew Gilbert is Senior Researcher at the Ethnography Lab at the University of Toronto and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus. He is a sociocultural anthropologist who has been doing research in Bosnia and Herzegovina for nearly 20 years.  His first research project focused on the politics of international intervention, as well as on the relationship between the historical imagination (how people conceive of history) and the political imagination (how people conceive what is politically possible).  More recently, he has investigated the conditions that create openings and closures to political experimentation and social transformation, focusing on a series of worker-initiated protests and their aftermath in the late industrial Bosnian city of Tuzla. This has led to a growing research interest in collaboration and in the political and ethnographic potential of diverse media, such as the graphic form that is the focus of this project.

BORIS STAPIĆ

Boris Stapić is an illustrator and graphic designer from Sarajevo. He is currently working for Sarajevo-based “Buybook” publishing house, where he designs covers for books written by local and international authors. In addition to working for commercial and marketing agencies, he has been involved in a number of creative projects focused on animated forms. His recent work is centered on visual explorations of street art and the politics of remembrance, the use of graphic form as a tool of investigative journalism, and the revalorization of socialist-era pop culture and hauntology in the context of the post-socialist revisionism in former Yugoslavia.

In the past, he has also worked with the team TrippleClaim Game Collective on designing aps and smaller video games, including educational games and those that thematize environmental issues. In his work, he explores the relationship between the image and meaning, and the process of its co-constitution through text, sound, narration and editing.