Dayton Express: Bosnian Railroads and the Paradox of Integration

2009 | Interactive Documentary | Flash/ActionScript 3.0, HTML and Javascript

Dayton Express is a rich web documentary in which director Amir Husak explores the challenges, possibilities, and significations of the Bosnian railroads in the aftermath of socialist Yugoslavia’s dismemberment. According to Husak, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s railway system becomes “a metaphor for social disintegration and the problems of integration.” Once an effective grid that crisscrossed the republic, Bosnia’s railroad system was interrupted by the Yugoslav Wars and has yet to reestablish its previous capacities since the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. Nonetheless, the railroad remains a mode of travel in which citizens of the countries segregated entities continue to encounter one another. The challenges of post-Dayton integration continue to resurface as the integrity of Bosnia-Herzegovina continues to be undermined by political elites from both domestic and international communities. Through targeted interviews with rail workers, photojournalistic visits to current stations, and careful attentions to how the trains operate in relation to Bosnia’s internal divisions that Dayton legally enshrined, researchers gain numerous insights. The project demonstrates how multimodal ethnography reveals the poetics and politics of infrastructure (Larkin 2013). By attending to Husak’s careful methodologies, researchers can learn how archival stills, travel video, railyard soundscapes, and photos animate the numerous meanings of aging transportation technology. Through Husak’s deployment of everything from public service campaign posters to different eras of railway maps, viewers encounter the painful ironies and possibilities of history in post-socialist spaces where both “express” and slow travel can tell detailed stories.

- by Owen Kohl, Emma Wagh (The MultiRepository, CASTAC, 2023)

• Screensaves/documentation: Vimeo showcase (link)