“Sleeping Giants: (Re)thinking Mutual Industrial Heritage” is a regional project that explores industrial heritage as a shared cultural resource and a space for contemporary creativity, learning, and community engagement in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Through seminars, residencies, workshops, and public events, the project invited young professionals and students to rethink post-socialist industrial sites as part of a broader European cultural legacy.
The project began with a series of thematic seminars in Sarajevo and Novi Sad focused on research, valorisation, urban regeneration, festival management, and festivals of industrial culture. These activities created a strong foundation for peer-to-peer exchange between partners and external experts, while also strengthening participants’ knowledge of industrial heritage and its potential for cultural and urban development.
An open call selected nine young participants from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina to join research residencies in Sarajevo and Novi Sad. During these residencies, participants explored sites such as Energoinvest and the BETON Factory through lectures, site visits, guided discussions, and collaborative research. The programme addressed themes including workers’ self-management, solidarity, women’s roles in socialist industry, and the transformation of industrial landscapes in post-socialist cities.
The research phase was followed by workshops that helped participants turn their findings into creative outputs, including essays, conceptual proposals, and a collaborative video work. These results were later presented publicly at the Days of Architecture Festival in Sarajevo and at MACHINA – Industrial Culture Festival in Novi Sad, the first festival of its kind in the Western Balkans created through this project.
The project successfully strengthened cross-border cooperation, supported young cultural practitioners, and created new ways of interpreting industrial heritage through artistic and participatory methods. It engaged 24 direct participants, more than 400 indirect beneficiaries, and a network of experts and institutions from the region and the European Union, namely Slovenia and Slovakia. It also established a sustainable model of participatory heritage practice that merges field research in the field of industrial culture, artistic interpretation, and community dialogue.
Implementing partners: Cultural studies platform CULTstore (Serbia) and Lift - Spatial Initiatives (Bosnia and Herzegovina).
“Sleeping Giants: (Re)thinking Mutual Industrial Heritage” project is supported by the British Council through the “Culture and Creativity for the Western Balkans” project, funded by the European Union. CC4WBs aims to foster dialogue in the Western Balkans by enhancing the cultural and creative sectors for increased socio-economic impact.