The 2025 ‘Why Remember? Testimonies of Light’ conference held in Sarajevo from 7–9 July marks 30 years since the Srebrenica genocide.

This year’s conference reflected on how these defining events continue to shape memory, reconciliation, and peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as other post-conflict societies throughout the world. 100 delegates from ten different countries attended the conference.

While commemorating this significant anniversary, we paid tribute to the legacy of our colleague Professor Paul Lowe (1963–2024), who founded the conference series and who was himself an inspiring teacher as well as an internationally acclaimed conflict photographer.

Colleagues from the Media and Screen Schools, Dr Edmund Clark, Dr Max Houghton, David Birkin, Professor Pratap Rughan, Brigitte Lardinois and Dean of Media Steve Cross, joined a wide range of international academics, artists, filmmakers, and activists in giving papers and convening panel. The conference closed with a performance from Thomas Gardner, MA Sound Arts Course Leader. The work of five students from MA Sound Arts was exhibited at the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Here, Steve Cross, LCC Dean of Media, reflects on this year’s conference...

Finding the right words to formally bring the curtain down on 2025’s edition of the ‘Why Remember?’ conference — one that was characterised by such dynamism, such commitment to its overarching theme, and such conviviality — has been no easy task.

As was demonstrated by the breadth and depth of the work we saw (and heard) during the three days in Sarajevo, ‘Why Remember?’ continues to galvanise research across a wide disciplinary spectrum.

And although it’s becoming much more commonplace to bring together art practice with, for example, the social and natural sciences, the humanities, and various forms of political activism, the dialogue that has been generated in this space over the years has a depth and maturity that is genuinely exploratory, collaborative, and perhaps quite unique.

The appetite to continue gathering in this way was palpable. 'Why Remember?’, as one of our speakers said, is an unfinished project, and, I would add, a necessarily unfinishable one.

What has become very clear is that ‘Why Remember?’ addresses with great urgency many of the multiple crises that we now face in our current conjuncture, and which echo all too alarmingly the conditions that gave rise to the horrors of the Bosnian conflict and the Srebrenica genocide.

Every epochal shift in the political order involves concerted attempts to own and to re-present the historical past and the many ways that we think, perceive and imagine, not just the past but also our present and our future, are being actively (and regressively) reshaped.

One of the key characteristics of the global alignment of resurgent national populists, crypto-fascists, and hard identitarians of every hue, currently in the ascendant, is a concerted attempt to impose its shrunken imaginaries across the social and cultural field. We’re all very familiar with the erasures, denials, the confected outrage and bitter resentment at any attempt to problematise or contest their particularist narratives, their own narrow and segmented ‘truths’.

Conversely, the space opened up by 'Why Remember?’, both during the week and throughout the years that it’s been running, has been a place in which to think, to reassess, and to work through not only the why of remembering, in all its messiness and complexity, but also the how.

Striving toward (if not ever quite reaching) shared or collective understandings, fostering solidarity where perfect unity is neither possible nor desirable, expose us to the difficulty of engaging with the themes that are the essence of ‘Why Remember?’.

But facing and accepting difficulty can enhance our capacities and our creative and relational potential. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, as someone once said. That’s what I’m taking away from this year’s conference, and that to me is what Paul Lowe’s work has laid the foundation for.

So much was said about Paul during the three days in Sarajevo. His capacity to bring people together, to give shape and structure to ideas and to turn them into action, his formidable energy and enthusiasm. As we toasted Paul’s memory, I could only concur with everything that others throughout the conference had already said about him. So much so, it seemed almost superfluous to attempt to add anything to the array of superlatives that he so richly deserves to be remembered through.

Paul was felt to be very present at this year’s 'Why Remember?’— a tutelary spirit presiding over the conference that he established and drove forward for so many years.

The task that remains for us going forward is to continue to provide a forum in which Paul’s commitment to the work that a conference such as this can do — as a nodal point for researchers, activists, artists — can go on.

That would be an appropriate way to memorialise Paul. A continuing endeavour. A never-ending conversation. A light in dark times.

Credits

This impactful conference was convened by Dr. Max Houghton at LCC together with Professor Kit Messham-Muir at Curtin University and Dr Henry Redwood at King’s College London. Dr Vera Zurbrügg convened a successful pre-conference PhD and practitioner day. Steve Cross, Dean of Media, and Brigitte Lardinois, Reader in the Public Understanding of Photography, were co-organisers.

The conference was supported in Sarajevo by the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Paul Lowe’s wife Amra Abadzic-Lowe spoke on the opening night and presented on life during the four-year siege of the city. Her support and hospitality during the event were invaluable.