In March 2024, Kuma International welcomed eleven students from the Syracuse School of Architecture and Yale University to Sarajevo for an intensive five-day research and workshop program led by Visiting Fellow Christina Zhang. The visit formed part of the project A Seed for a Song: Urban Seed Libraries as Memory Vessels, developed by Christina Zhang in collaboration with Smirna Kulenović and Kuma International.
Bringing together architecture, memory studies, ecology, and artistic research, the project explored how public space can become a site for care, remembrance, resilience, and collective imagination within post-traumatic urban environments.
Throughout the program, students participated in workshops, lectures, discussions, and field visits led by Kuma collaborators, artists, architects, researchers, and educators, including Claudia Zini (Kuma International), Smirna Kulenović (Berlin University of the Arts), Dunja Krvavac (Dani Arhitekture), Selma Ćatović Hughes (American University of Sharjah), Ismar Čirkinagić (Independent Visual Artist), Ena Kukić (Graz University of Technology), Lejla Odobašić (International BURCH University), and Nasiha Pozder (University of Sarajevo).
At the center of the project was the question: how do we create hopeful and caring spaces within post-traumatic cities? The seed became a central metaphor throughout the workshop — something capable of surviving long periods underground before growing again, carrying within it ideas of resilience, continuity, memory, and transformation.
Working across Sarajevo, students developed proposals for small-scale urban “seed libraries” situated within public space. These imagined structures were conceived not only as places for preserving and exchanging indigenous plant seeds, but also as spaces for gathering, storytelling, oral history, and community interaction. Through this process, students explored how architecture can function as a tool for listening, healing, and reconnecting fragmented social and historical landscapes.
The project also reflected on the symbolic role seeds hold within Bosnia and Herzegovina, where they carry histories of survival, wartime memory, intergenerational knowledge, and care for the land. Through artistic and architectural research, participants were encouraged to translate fieldwork and local encounters into sensitive and socially engaged design responses.