“Our Family Garden” – an evening with Smirna Kulenović
On Human Rights Day 2025, the House of European History invites you to a unique event with Bosnian transdisciplinary artist Smirna Kulenović.
Talks
- Date
- 10 December 2025, 18:00-21:00 (CET)
- Location
- House of European History, Rue Belliard/straat 135, 1000 Brussels, Belgium
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which concluded with the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995. Sarajevo’s landscape and people, who went through a lengthy and deadly siege, still bear the scars of that war. In 2021, artist Smirna Kulenović (b. 1994) and a group of 100 women planted 1,000 calendula plants in the former war trenches on Zlatište hill. This created a living monument, and started a process of social and ecological healing.
The exhibition Presence of the Past – a European Album features Smirna Kulenović’s community-based performance “Our Family Garden” in its section on “post-heroic commemorations”. As part of the Through the Lens Of museum series, the artist will share her personal story and the significance of the “Our Family Garden” project.
The language of the event is English. Entering the building involves security checks, please plan enough time in advance.
Programme
18:15-19:00
“End of Yugoslavia” guided tour
by curator Simina Bădică
19:00-19:45
Talk
by Smirna Kulenović
19:45-20:30
Q&A session
with the audience
Until 21:00
Event participants can visit
the exhibition Presence of the Past
It’s amazing to see how nature can heal itself – much faster than we humans do.
Zlatište is a hill overlooking Sarajevo; a wound carved into my family’s history.
About the speaker
Smirna Kulenović is a transdisciplinary artist, researcher, educator, and ritualist whose practice weaves art, ecology, and memory.
Born in Sarajevo under siege, she explores how embodied rituals, plant intelligence, and ancestral practices heal landscapes and communities fractured by war, displacement, and ecological violence.
Working across the Balkans, with a focus on the Mediterranean bioregion, she co-creates pilgrimages, films, installations, and educational projects that reconnect ancestral wisdom with future resilience.
Her ongoing PhD Research at UdK Berlin, “Witchcraft for the Wounded Earth”, bridges eco-somatics, decolonial feminism, and ritual art, transforming collective wounds into acts of care and re-rooting. Through her work, Kulenovic cultivates spaces where art becomes alchemy, tending to the resilience of both humans and more-than-human worlds.
Her artistic versatility extends to documentary film, with both Our Family Garden (2021) and The Test of Maturity (2012) winning awards in European and American film festivals.
A grandmother, mother and daughter prepare to plant flowers in the former trenches from which Sarajevo was besieged between 1992 and 1996