I am a 26 free-lance photographer, filmmaker and journalist based between Rome and Sarajevo. In 2007 I started working on long-term documentary projects, focusing mainly on social issues and post war consequences in the Balkans.

The exteriors of the houses and apartment blocks display a multitude of open wounds. The holes made by machine-gun fire and the white blotches of concrete, used to fill up the gaping cavities created by the bombs, look like imaginary constellations scattered across the whole of Bosnia. Recollection, notwithstanding the implacable passing of time, is swathed with scars, but it is not the destruction that causes us to remember the horrors of war, neither is it purely the pain for those lost; more than anything it is the daily endeavor to recuperate thousands of hidden identities. Sixteen years after the end of the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia ten thousand humans, who simply vanished into mid-air, are still missing. The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) in Sarajevo has been working non-stop, ever since 1996, with the intent of identifying the missing persons who disappeared during the armed conflicts, thus contributing to the development of an appropriate commemoration of the victims. The discolored photos, identity cards, crumpled bank notes are all fragments of humanity buried in time. Every year hundreds of human remains are identified and on July 11th, the anniversary of the fall of Srebrenica, all those bodies are given back to their relatives. It hasn’t been easy growing up in Bosnia. Children there have had to grow up quickly. They have had to struggle to survive. A lots of youths see their future rather black yet some have decided to stay: Nihad, Tarik, Sucur and the other “members of the gang” who live on the streets in Sarajevo. The rules of street-life have taught them that they can only rely on themselves. Many of them have been, more or less willingly, influenced by the “myth” of those who took advantage of the war and of the mirage of easy gain, where the law of the physically powerful seemed to be the only law feasible. Many of them have witnessed their friends die in peace, not in war. Others have lost parents and family members. Consequently, there is always a hint of sadness in their eyes. And those melancholic smiles mark the time of their childhood, never really lived to the full. At the end of the war the Bosnians have had to deal also with other consequences: more than one hundred thousand mines infested the territory during the years of conflict and it will take another ten years to clear all the areas at risk. Adis was thirteen when an anti-personnel mine nearly killed him. He was going to play football with a friend. After various operations, the loss of his left eye and right arm, he has pulled through. Only four years previously he had lost his father and grandfather, both killed during the siege. Fifteen years later, Adis is a married man. “For the first time in my life – he says – I am happy”.

Matteo Bastianelli

Weekend portfolio selected by Jean-Luc Monterosso.