ARchipelago App: Expanding Access to Wartime History in Mostar
Today, representatives of the ARchipelago project—Armina Pilav, Clarissa Thieme, Kaya Behkalam, Farhan Khalid, Simone Voigt, and Damir Ugljen—visited Center for Peace and Multi-Ethnic Cooperation Mostar to discuss their innovative digital archive and public space platform focused on post-Yugoslav contexts. Launched this year, ARchipelago is an archival application and online repository that gathers collections of wartime documents. It is active in Sarajevo, Prizren, Mostar, and Belgrade.
During their visit, the ARchipelago team was introduced to various initiatives of the Center for Peace Mostar. They expressed particular interest in the Center’s archival materials, including the archival collection of the Islamic Community in Mostar, which has been entrusted to the Center for permanent preservation due to its importance to memory culture. There was a shared acknowledgment of the urgent need for digitizing this video and photo material to make it accessible to a broader audience, both domestically and internationally. This would facilitate a deeper understanding of the events of the 1990s. The ARchipelago team expressed their support and interest in collaborating on this effort.
Thirty years after the conflicts that led to the dissolution of Yugoslavia, numerous dedicated archival initiatives now offer a crucial multiperspective view of the region’s recent history. ARchipelago brings together diverse archival voices by transforming the smartphone into a convenient archival tool, accessible regardless of local and political restrictions. Using GPS data, the app marks audio-visual documents, making them available through an augmented reality (AR) app that allows users to experience and explore locations associated with these records. The project explores AR technology as a practical, participatory archival practice in public spaces, creating a cross-section of controversial and conflicting narratives in four post-Yugoslav urban cases. Together, these efforts provide a multidirectional view of history with much to discover and share.
In general, augmented reality (AR) enhances the user’s view of the real world by overlaying computer-generated images, creating a layered, interactive experience. AR combines real-world elements with digital information, enabling users to engage naturally and intuitively with virtual objects and information. It uses computer vision, sensors, and other technologies to track and recognize physical objects in the real world, overlaying digital data onto them.