In Serbia, rivers are not only lines on a map. Belgrade, for example, rests at the dramatic confluence of the Sava and the Danube, one of Europe’s great river crossings. Here, waters from the Alps and the Balkans join the slow continental current that flows all the way to the Black Sea. This confluence has been both a lifeline and a battlefield. The city was once a Roman outpost, a Ottoman frontier, a Habsburg border, while today it symbolizes a space that remains in motion.
In this chapter of the project, we might find ourselves standing at Kalemegdan fortress, asking what remains in the water of these layered histories; can a river can remember sieges and crossings; or does it wash them away?
Further upriver, in Novi Sad, the Danube becomes a mirror of stillness as it widens and slows its flow. Nearby wetlands and backwaters, shrouded in mist, remind us that even in apparent dormancy, water sustains fragile ecologies. In winter, the Danube holds its role as both archive and lifeline, inviting us to ponder whether we can attune to water's quiet rhythms in the seemingly silent season?
In Serbia, these explorations took place via three workshops in collaboration with three partners in Belgrade and Novi Sad.
The project partners were:
