The Flowers of Srebrenica – solidarity across countries and times

‘The Flowers of Srebrenica’ is a stage reimagining of the illustrated novel by Aidan Hehir, where a road trip from Sarajevo to the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial shatters the certainties of the ‘Western male spectator’. The memory of those tragic events, still pervading the land and its survivors, slowly resurfaces, as both a reminder of Western responsibilities in ‘foreign’ conflict and as an invitation to practise empathy. Performed by a cast of refugee and migrant actors with lived experiences of war and displacement, our stage version will maintain the central narrative but in the context of a wider discourse, transcending Balkans borders so that Srebrenica and its memory become the symbol of all genocides that have happened in the world in the last 30 years. As most people – especially in Europe – just watch such genocides on screen doing nothing, the question is what does it take for ‘spectators’ to care?