Funding Festivals: Bringing the World to Sarajevo
Funding Festivals: Bringing the World to Sarajevo

Summary/Abstract: The focus of this article is on the “festivalization” of Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia-Herzegovina, after the signing of the Dayton Agreement (1995), and the donor environment during that time that largely supported foreign rather than local performances. I chronicle a shif – from socialist-era regional festivals before the war to post-war period staged multi-day multi-performance events with foreign programming – and highlight the tendency of donors to de-emphasize local diference as a way of creating politically safe aiding strategies. I unpack why the “festival model” was atractive to local and foreign cultural organizers during this period. Specifcally I discuss the reorganization of the Sarajevo Winter Festival as well as other festivals that existed before the war and continued to produce such events afer the war.

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