Even if there was not one participant for a sambaworkshop in Belgrade, quite a lot of people were interested in silkscreening, sitostampa, in serbian language.
We met twice in the evening in the cultural center "Rex" to develop some designs. The difficulty this time was to awake some artificial joy in the people. Nearly all complained about a lack of ideas and not enough skills to draw a nice picture. My task for the group was to create any image, just put an idea, a sentence on the paper and later on we would find a way to increase the design ( collage, internet, computer, use of different layers) It is always amazing how low selfconfidence people have in ther imagination and theit skills, even if they are very talented drawers. Especially for me was the gap intereting between the young girls from Plav and these adults. the girls didn´t even complain one minut about the way they designed their pictures, for them it was the best picture in the world. what great difference 10 years make to a personality!But in the end everybody had at least something on his or her paper. Some bulgarians wanted to make a screen against the destruction of their mountain wood for new ski areas, some linux geeks came up with pro-linux designs and a people from queer belgrade and stanipanikollektiv, our host also made something for their organisations. A Punkrocker added some "typical" punkdesigns, pretty well so far.
Due to a not very good organisation in Belgrad it was up to me to find in the last moment a spot where we could develop the screen and lighten them. We did it in the flat of one of our hosts where we also party lived. It was an absurd situation, very crowed, in 2 rooms about 15 people, some of our AA group, some of the silkscreeners and people who live in this flat. In the last corner we put up our glass and our "darkroom" found its place under a bed. So we did the whole procedure of silkscreening an in the end we had 3 big, mostly well developed screens with various designs.
On the next day I drove with some guy from stanipanikollektiv and Coen to the 5 th park to do silkscreening there. I had no idea about this park or whats going to happen to me and I was pretty surprised how small it was. When we arrived nobody was on the street. 10 minutes later everybody was. We brought juggling stuff and all the kids tried to suceed in it, the television spotted by as well as all the old ladys and weirdos of the neighbourhood.
People were pretty happy about our visit and organised immediately 2 tables and all the kids came up with their t-shirts.It was pretty weird, the guy left and Coen went off to pick up the video people and the rest of the group by van. So I was alone with my 30 words of serbian language surrounded by a lot of big eyes and everybody wanted to have something...but it was nice and I could at least communicate with some kindergarten kids, who visit the english kindergarten...
Later on the people from the silkscreenworkshop came and helped my out, a lot of kids in belgrad wear now the squatters signs or the linuxpenguin...Very late the videocrew arrived and showed some movies people did in belgrad as well as some from english actions against motorways. treehousecamps and so on. People kept on applauding, when the squatters chaised away the police and said, yes, thats the way how to deal with them.
In reality there were just 5 policemen around the corner, the kept all the time very much in the background, but were also interested in watching the movies. But you never can know, when private securities show up there again and close this, was is left from a former park for a nice road, a shoppingcenter etc.
All in all it was a nice evening for everybody and we hope people stay as resistant as they are by now. And at least one guy from Belgrade was so fanatic about silkscreening, that he immediately announced a workshop for the following thursday for all the people who are interested and had to work during the week and he was pretty sure about going with this. The good thing for Belgrade people is, that there is, as far as I got to know the only silkscreen shop for the whole area, like Montenegro, Mazedonia, Serbia and Albania, so it is in comparison to the other people I met on this tour pretty easy to have accesss to material. Thus even nearly everything is about improvisation, you need at least one special liquid and the screen itself. This was the week point on all the silkscreen workshops on the tour I gave, because it is not easy to get those materials if you live in albania, but still the workshop encourages at least some creativity or awareness and actually the rpinting on the t-shirts itself was always the shortest part of the workshop, mainly we spent 2 days just of coming up with designs which have enough content to be worth to wear all day.
Silvia