Joseph Charles Recupero

Post-Socialism, Youth Culture, Cities, Nationalism, Post-Conflict

Former Soviet Union/Yugoslavia; Bosnia and Herzegovina

Joseph Recupero’s project takes the city of Sarajevo as a cultural index for understanding the complexities of crossgenerational, multi-ethnic existence in Bosnia and Hezigovina in a post-socialist, postconflict context. He seeks to understand the impact of both past memory and future precarity crossgenerationally, as manifested in the material environment of Sarajevo. Through the examination of physically present soft-culture such as rap and graffiti, Joseph hopes to listen to the complexities of a city and region that have so often been simplified and spoken for in both the realms of the historical and the political. By seeing Sarajevo not just as a city, but as a material manifestation of desires, fears, hopes, and relations, Joseph is attempting to understand the city and its people as more than just the remnants of an ‘ethnic’ conflict. 

Gettysburg College, BA in Anthropology and Political Science, 2017