DOI https://doi.org/10.2298/MUZ1722133H UDC 338.48-611(497.6 Сарајево) 78.091.4 Funding Festivals: Bringing the World to Sarajevo* Erica Haskell1 University of New Haven, Connecticut, USA Received: 15 February 2017 Accepted: 1 June 2017 Original scientific paper Abstract The focus of this article is on the “festivalization” of Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia-Herzegovina, after the signing of the Dayton Agreement (1995), and the donor environment during that time that largely supported foreign rather than local performances. I chronicle a shift – from socialist-era regional festivals before the war to post-war period staged multi-day multi-performance events with foreign programming – and highlight the tendency of donors to de-emphasize local difference as a way of creating politically safe aiding strategies. I unpack why the “festival model” was attractive to local and foreign cultural organizers during this period. Specifically I discuss the reorganization of the Sarajevo Winter Festival as well as other festivals that existed before the war and continued to produce such events after the war. Keywords: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sarajevo, music, post-conflict, festivals, post- socialist, applied ethnomusicology “[I]t is possible to organize a concert at a high professional level without entertainers’ charity, which all kinds of humanitarians from around the world dumped on this city over the last four years.”2 * Portions of this article were included in my dissertation “Aiding Harmony? Culture as a Tool in Post-Conflict Sarajevo” with support from the American Councils Central Europe Research Scholar Program. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:11298/ 1
[email protected] 2 From an article in Dani (August 1996) titled “Mladen Vojičić Tifa,” describing Tifa’s upcoming concert in Sarajevo.