FAMA Survival Guide Sarajevo, distributed by Workman Publishing, Printed in Croatia, 1993
“Sarajevo a unique city on the planet! Sarajevo lives the post-Cataclysm! Sarajevo os Science Fiction! Sarajevo gives you instructions on how to survive!”
…some of the dystopian slogans printed on the cover of ‘Survival Guide Sarajevo’ produced by independent group of writers and artists FAMA between April 1992 and 1993 during the siege of Sarajevo under the fire of shells and snipers that made life let alone work in the city impossible.
This document has been created in the city were one civilization was dismantled in course of intentional violence, and where another one had to be born, the one of 21st century. It is a chronicle, a part of the future archive which shows the city of Sarajevo not as a victim, but as a place of experiment where a candid dose of laconic tactics and wit can still achieve victory over terror.
Here the quest of survival creates a new force, a force of something that is borne out of and, at the same moment, breaks from the cataclysm to create something out of almost nothing. ‘Survival Guide Sarajevo’ is like a Michelin guide, but unlike any guide book it blatantly exposes the fine line between death and life, giving a tour of the city with instructions on how to survive in any urban environment without food, transportation, hotels, taxis, telephones, heating, electricity. Some of the entries include tips to burn books without humour or poetry to keep warm. How passionate smokers smoke tea — chamomile and swiss chard leaves cut into tobacco. A report on how tree-cutting has become the new city-discipline. Recipes for Sarajevo sake, fermenting birch juice and the edibility of unsuspecting vegetation such as leaves of all kinds.
“All leaves were used as ingredients — from parks, gardens and fields which were not dangerous to visit. Combined with rice, and well seasoned, everything becomes edible. Each person in Sarajevo is very close to an ideal macrobiotican, a real role-model for the health-conscious diet-troubled West. A war cookbook emerged spontaneously , as a survival best-seller.”
This book puts an end to mere exploratory dabbles and shows how inventiveness is key to survival at the most perfidious moments. Here the notion of polemogastronomy is but dire act of survival, at once the humor becomes the only saving grace against human blows.
Within this, the idea of urbanibalism takes another, disquieting resonance. A besieged city forced into self- containment, its inhabitants eat a ‘precious mix of wild imagination’. I kept reading the snail recipe again and again. Garden snails “ After the rain, in the park or garden, find snails, wash them and cook them as long as It takes to leave their homes” with constant hiding, darkness and terror somehow the snail withdrawn into its shell — half dead, half alive — becomes a poignant metaphor for a state of siege.