Artist Designs Book to Help Migrants Survive: If art can occupy both poetic and utilitarian registers, Mladen Miljanović succeeds with his Didactic Wall exhibition

Laura Raicovich in Hyperallergic:

The city of Bihać in Bosnia and Herzegovina is about a 10-minute drive or one-hour walk from the Croatian border, making it a key gateway to enter the European Union for people displaced by war, climate realities, and economic crisis. As a result, over the past several years, the region has seen a dramatic militarization of its border areas. In a bid to prevent or discourage migrants from attempting the crossing, the EU funds both humanitarian support for migrants in Bosnia, which is not an EU country, and strengthening the military apparatus in Croatia, which is part of the EU (but is not party to the Schengen Agreement).

Acutely aware of this bottleneck, artist Mladen Miljanović recently put his artistic skills together with the practical knowledge attained from his mandatory military training to help migrants survive their journey through myriad obstacles of natural terrain, border fences and walls, and sundry surveillance and emergency situations. He imagined the kind of information that would be most useful and created diagrams and drawings similar to those in military training manuals for a pocket-sized handbook.

More here.