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Mitrovica Rock Music School

A school of rock and roll for the children of war. We are in Mitrovica. 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mitrovica has become the new Berlin of Europe, divided not by bricks and mortar but by the river Ibar: on one side the Albanians on the other the Serbs. In the middle a new school of rock and roll, which brings back the glorious past of Mitrovica, once renowned in the Balkan area as one of the “capitals of rock”. The project began in October 2009 , an idea of the Dutch NGO “Musicians with no Frontiers”, aiming at rebuilding the cultural makeup of the city and communication between the two sides using the universal language of music. The idea is to create, in the near future, one school where everyone can study together peacefully, but at present, the memory of the war and the tension between different ethnic groups is still alive and forces teachers to keep working in two different buildings: one in the north for the Kosovar Serbs and the other in the south for the Kosovar Albanians. Nevertheless, young musicians from both communities do share moments and get together in occasions such as summer camps organized in the nearby Macedonian area, where they fight their war to the rhythm of music. The young Kosovars, from whichever ethnic group, disregard the past and grow up sharing the same myths and ambitions: become a great rock musician one day. In my work portraits of Albanians students are set in the south of the city (where they live ) alternated with portraits of Serbs students, set in the north of the city. On the background, church, mosque and the Ibar river which divide the city in two. This sequence of portraits is alternated with daily life scene taken in the two branch of the Mitrovica Rock School Music. © ALESSANDRO GRASSANI

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