The Score (You and I Both Know)

Through an installation of photographs and sound The Score (You and I Both Know) transports viewers to the siege of Sarajevo, its embodied, material and auditory cartography of violence, and the lasting injuries inflicted on bodies and trees alike.

Silva’s starting point is a row of linden trees along the River Miljacka that mark Sarajevo’s former frontline. As well as being witnesses to the conflict, these trees were also active participants, forming a living shield to sniper fire. Today, their role is immortalised in their trunks and branches which bear the scars of the war.

In Silva’s words: “When I first heard about the linden trees that marked Sarajevo’s former frontline, I was fascinated. I learnt to read their surfaces, and I began to think of each mark in the bark as a record or a score. Also as a musical score – these bullets and shrapnel become audible with a metal detector and this audio is woven through a Yugoslav Partisan song in the soundscape played in the gallery. I think a lot about rhythm and pace in the way I work with photographs. Here I have placed them in relation to the soundscape and a photograph I encountered in a citizen archive in Sarajevo. Through the works in the exhibition, I look at how the consequences of war might continue to reverberate through bodies, landscapes and memory, and consider the resilience of the more-than-human world in the face of human violence.”

The deeply resonant exhibition is testimony to injury and resistance in the face of the deliberate targeting of civilian populations in time of war, capturing the scenes and sounds of lived experience during conflict and its aftermath.

Corinne Silva’s works evoke the multiple ways in which the violence of war leaves its imprint, conceived in the project as ‘injury’. From individual bodies to the material spaces of the cityscape, injury leaves traces that endure across generations.

Professor Vivienne Jabri, January 2023