Climate Truth Crisis Learning Activity at Sarajevo
- Written byAnkita Dhal
- Published date 29 January 2026
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In November, a group of students along with staff member Peter Hall travelled to Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina for the Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership project titled Climate Truth Crisis. The project brings together students and staff from seven art and design academies in The Hague, Reykjavík, Barcelona, London, Vilnius, Tallinn and Sarajevo. This educational programme investigates the implications of climate change scepticism on democracy and public trust. Through information design, video and visual storytelling, participants engage with the research question: if democracy relies on assuming voters are well informed enough to make political choices, how might communication engage people with serious issues and help them distinguish news from fake news in order to effectively support sustainable change?
The second student activity took place in Sarajevo at the Academy of Fine Arts, the previous having been held in Tallinn. The Sarajevo programme focused on identifying, exposing and visually communicating climate related fake news. Through lectures and collaborative workshops, students explored how climate misinformation is constructed, disseminated and legitimised, and how visual communication can both reinforce and challenge these narratives.
Listen to the lectures delivered as part of the training week.
As part of the events programme, the host institute kindly organised a guided walk through the city of Sarajevo to situate us within its history and political context. Beginning in the old city, our guide Ahmed from Meet Bosna explained that the name Bosnia comes from the River Bosna and Herzegovina from the German word Herze, a title adopted by a former ruler despite little German presence in the region. In 1878, the Austro Hungarian Empire formally combined the two, naming the territory that is geographically divided by the Dinaric Alps.
Architecturally, the city reflects a rich layering of influences including Neo Moorish, Renaissance, Classical, Byzantine and Baroque styles. One of the most striking examples is a former synagogue, now a cultural centre, which beautifully demonstrates this blend. In the nineteenth century, many Orthodox churches were built to accommodate Orthodox Christian communities whose political and cultural presence in the Balkans was being challenged by rising nationalism. We also visited the Sacred Heart Cathedral, a symbol of the Catholic community, historically one of the most marginalised groups in the region. The building displays strong Neo Gothic and Romanesque elements.
As we walked, we noticed red marks embedded in pavements and roads. Our guide explained that during the Siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, sites where three or more people were killed were later filled with red resin mortar in the scars left by shell impacts. When it rains, these marks glisten like blood, ensuring that violence and loss remain visible in everyday life. These memorials are known as the Sarajevo Roses.
As one walks through Sarajevo, traces of Sephardi Jewish culture can also be found, which have significantly shaped the city’s musical heritage. We also visited the Gazi Husrev Bey Mosque, built during the golden age of the Ottoman Empire, further revealing the layered cultural and religious histories that continue to shape the city.
Bosnia and Herzegovina carries a deeply complex religious and political history in which the two are closely intertwined. We stopped at the site where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, an event that triggered the First World War. This location has been reinterpreted multiple times throughout history, at times framed as a symbol of revolution, at others of terrorism, or simply as a historical landmark. Each narrative reflected the ideology of those in power and shaped understandings of freedom, nationalism and geopolitics.
Between the river, the layered architecture, the evidence of rich cultural life and the visible traces of war, Sarajevo stands as a powerful testament to resilience. This context deeply affected our diverse group of international students and teachers. As Bosnia and Herzegovina is currently a candidate for European Union membership, the city also embodies the tensions of contemporary geopolitics and competing visions of development in a country striving for stability.
Our project brief was to analyse climate related fake news headlines within the Bosnian context and develop media campaigns to challenge them. We worked using the FLICC framework, which identifies five key techniques of science denial: fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry picking and conspiracy theories. Each group, consisting of students from different partner universities and supported by local and international tutors, selected one false narrative and developed a campaign within three days.
I worked alongside Nur, Marina, Oliver and Emina. The statement we chose to respond to was: “Developing countries such as Bosnia and Herzegovina must use their natural resources in order to develop.” Our response took the form of “Do, Nothing”, an anti campaign that challenges dominant climate and development narratives imposed on Bosnia and Herzegovina, particularly the assumption that progress must come through the extraction and exploitation of nature. The project critiques this externally driven logic that equates development with industrial growth, while overlooking local understandings of wellbeing, justice, stability and ecological care.
Through a series of disruptive posters and street interventions, the campaign reframes everyday Bosnian practices such as coffee culture, local food, slow tourism and community life as already existing and sustainable forms of development. Using irony, refusal and the slogan Do, Nothing, it proposes slowness, care and non extraction as acts of resistance to growth driven European development models. The project positions doing nothing not as passivity, but as a critical pause to ask who defines progress, who benefits from it and at what social and ecological cost.
The next learning activity will be hosted by Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering in the coming months, and we look forward to sharing more soon.
This story was written by Ankita Dhal, a design researcher with a background in Architecture and currently pursuing the MA Global Collaborative Design Practice at Camberwell College of Arts. As a Postgraduate Ambassador, she runs the interest group BrickbyBite. To get in touch, email a.dhal0320241@arts.ac.uk.
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