Drifting through Cityscapes Drifting through Cityscapes MTL final copy | Page 120

»Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.« To a
common Belgrade visitor, this would sound like a suitable quote regarding
the (un)cleanness of the city. To a common Belgrader, it would sound like
a huge exaggeration. »Oh, come on now!«, they would say, almost offend-
ed. »There are a few plastic bags on the ground, but that’s not even some-
thing worth mentioning. Why are you being such a nitpick?«, an old lady at
the bus stop would say, throwing her half finished ciggarete on the ground,
steping on it, and then steping onto the bus. »Yeah, I hate the trash as well,
people are so nasty around here!«, a young man would say, as he puts
down his cup of instant coffee next to him on the bench, leaving it there,
as he hurries back to work. Well, let me tell you a story about three girls who
wandered through Belgrade with no destination in mind. Once upon a
time, there was a workshop, in a far away city of Belgrade. The workshop
was of artistic kind, gathering artists from all over the region. That’s where
they met. Three young girls, art students, adventurers. The city itself was a
dirty one. It’s citizens didn’t seem to care. Consumed by their own worries,
even the most conscientuous of citizens, failed to recognize the trash that
they lived in. »How can we fix this? How can we even make them notice
this chaos? How can we participate? How can we coexist, resist and on
some awareness insist?«, they asked. Those three girls were us.
The idea itself didn’t dawn on us all at once. On the contrary, at the very
beginning of the workshop we felt quite lost. We walked through the city,
getting to know each other. In an attempt to fill the awkward silence, one
of us metioned the awful amount of dirt all over the city. After excanging
quite similar views on ecology, we realized that we might be onto some-
thing. The idea was born. The conversation we had was a very valuable
one, considering that all three of us came form different backgrounds.
While exchanging our experiences, we realised that the topic was way
more extensive than we initially thought. We had to find our focal point.
Unawareness of Belgrade citizens to basic principles of ecology, their lack
of enviromental culture and the ways we could potentially change that –
those were the things that inspired us most. Next day, we took the idea a bit
further. We knew what we wanted to do. We knew what the end result was
supposed to look like. The only remaining question was – how? We strived to
make something contemporary, that also follows basic principles of design.