Isak Albahrij's Oven, 1992.The Sarajevo survival tools project is both an exhibition and a virtual archive of the tools, implements and re-inventions from the Sarajevo siege of 1992-1996.
Seige, whether by war as in the 3-year seige of Leningrad or by sanctions as in the last forty years for Cuba or by environmental disaster as is now unfolding in Japan, means a lack of everything: food, water, medicine, fuel. It shouldn't be that total deprivation makes people creative, but it does.
Sarajevo survival tools run from the watering can made out of a cooking oil tin delivered as humanitarian aid, to a sat phone left behind by fleeing UN workers and quickly appropriated. There is a double-barrelled rifle, minimal in the extreme, and a hand crank flashlight made out of a bicycle lamp. This isn't a return to primitive technology, many of the materials are taken from electronic equipment and re-engineered with considerable sophistication. However, even making an oven out of an aluminum drum results in an object that sustains life and therefore is necessarily beautiful.
Isak Albahrij's Oven, 1992.