On September 17, 2023, the “Figure It Out” project hosted its second storytelling event in the Serbian village of Mošorin.
This gathering was a collaboration between the Belgrade-based cultural organization KIOSK (Ana Adamović, Jelena Mijić, Branislava Stefanović and Milica Pekić), Mara Ferreri, Valeria Graziano, and Tomislav Medak, took place at the Centre for Earth Architecture—a newly established community space built with traditional clay techniques by architect Dragana Marjanović. The bonfire was not just a storytelling session but a multilingual experiment aimed at showcasing and sharing the voices of Eastern European women who have used ingenuity to navigate challenges such as borders, poverty, and domestic labor.
Mošorin’s rural setting set the stage for the event. Participants arrived from Belgrade, and after sharing morning refreshments, they gathered in a talking circle. Stories—23 in total—were shared in Serbian, with English translations provided, covering themes from small-scale smuggling across borders to the hidden labor involved in surviving precarious jobs and inflation. Each story offered a window into the survival strategies of women facing difficult social security systems, working multiple jobs, or lending a hand to migrants passing through the region. A communal lunch and a clay workshop complemented the session, encouraging further informal conversations.
Some of the stories shared at the event came from the research carried out by the Kiosk team through a series of encounters and conversations with women in towns, cities and villages across Serbia, which resulted in the publication “Women’s Affair”.