Mostar's Little Dragon - How Bruce Lee became a symbol of peace in the Balkans.

Contribution from Marija
In 2004, the Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art launched the project "De/Construction of Monument. Within the project" "Urban Movement Mostar" came forward with an initiative to erect a monument to Bruce Lee in the city of Mostar. Inauguration of the Bruce Lee Monument, made by Croatian artist Ivan Fijolić, took place on Saturday, November 26, 2005 in Mostar, Bosnia.

The kung fu movie star Bruce Lee would have turned 65 in November, and a two-ring media circus descended on Mostar, Bosnia, for his birthday. It was then that the world's first public monument to Lee was unveiled. Building civil society never seemed so weird: Here was a life-sized bronze statue of a topless American immigrant paid for by the German government and christened by a Chinese diplomat, erected at the behest of a dysfunctional community of Croats, Serbs, and Muslims, in the city that saw intense warfare during the Bosnian war from 1992- 1995 that involved ethnic cleansing.

This initiative represents an attempt for the public spaces to regain their meaning, and at the same time to question the significance of monuments and symbols, old ones as well as new ones. By mixing up a "high" stylistic registry (monuments, grandeur, bronze) and a "low" one (mass-culture, kung fu, heroes of our childhood), a short circuit of reception is produced: the "high" stylistic registry is being deconstructed and the overwhelming mythomany is being ironized (Who are our heroes? Whom to and why do we build monuments?), but at the same time the "low" registry is being revalorized, for its power to evoke little ordinary things of everyday life that do not have anything to do with politics and ideologies, and that bring people and nations together instead of separating them. Bruce Lee was chosen by organisers as a symbol of the fight against ethnic divisions. Lee, who was an American of Chinese descent and famous martial arts actor, represented to the residents of Mostar a bridging of cultures. "One thing we all have in common is Bruce Lee.” In a city with a reputation for violence, the dynamic movie star was a symbol of "loyalty, skill, friendship and justice."

It may seem odd that a city trying to overcome its reputation for violence would choose as a symbol a man famous for artfully snapping vertebrae. But violence is relative, nowhere more so than Bosnia. Lee never used a weapon designed after the Han dynasty. His preference, famously, was the nunchaku, a weapon of wood and rope with origins in the tools of Asian subsistence agriculture. Nobody ever massacred a village with nunchucks.

As with a Lee roundhouse kick, the post-political point seems to have been made with grace and power; the Lee statue elicited only smiles and shrugs from locals on every side of Mostar's tense three-way divide. "I'm very happy about it," one Muslim resident told Agence France-Presse. "For a moment it did not matter who is Muslim and who is Croat."

If Lee is an unlikely symbol for unity in Bosnia, he is also, alas, not an entirely effective one: Just hours after the monument was unveiled, a group of rowdy teenagers defaced the statue and stole the nunchucks, leaving the site littered with wine bottles. According to Sky News, one citizen responded with the cry, "Once again we've shown what Balkan savageness is!"