Greetings from Shtromka --- midterm event
For our midterm event, we returned to Shtromka with the same curiosity that guides the studio: approaching it not as a fixed district, but as a place made up of shifting meanings, blurred edges, and overlapping stories. Shtromka doesn’t appear clearly on a map, and it never offers a single beginning or end. Instead, it’s a constantly changing mix of histories, developments, landscapes, and imaginations—shaped as much by environmental and urban processes as by how people perceive, describe, and imagine it.
With this in mind, we asked a central question: how do we relate differently to things we assume are the same? What memories, observations, and imaginations coexist to form what any of us call “Shtromka”?
Rather than searching for one definition, we followed the studio’s emphasis on fieldwork and open-ended exploration. “Greetings from Shtromka” became a collage-postcard workshop designed to bring many voices into our evolving sense of the place. Each participant contributed their own fragments—elements drawn from memory, curiosity, and speculation—helping to broaden and complicate the collective image we are forming.
Each postcard became a small, intuitive space for participants to interpret Shtromka in their own way. Rather than recording specific site impressions, the workshop encouraged them to play with visual and textual fragments and let new connections appear through cutting, arranging, and writing. In doing so, participants gave form to Shtromka’s shifting character and expanded how we, as a group, understand and imagine the site.
What emerged was not a single portrait, but a collection of viewpoints—each revealing a different way of sensing a place in motion. Together, these postcards reflect the studio’s core idea: that Shtromka is both a real environment and a conceptual lens. They show how the place is shaped not only by its physical terrain or plans for development, but also by the interpretations people bring, the stories they share, and the ways we continually rewrite what Shtromka is and might become.
For our midterm event, we returned to Shtromka with the same curiosity that guides the studio: approaching it not as a fixed district, but as a place made up of shifting meanings, blurred edges, and overlapping stories. Shtromka doesn’t appear clearly on a map, and it never offers a single beginning or end. Instead, it’s a constantly changing mix of histories, developments, landscapes, and imaginations—shaped as much by environmental and urban processes as by how people perceive, describe, and imagine it.
With this in mind, we asked a central question: how do we relate differently to things we assume are the same? What memories, observations, and imaginations coexist to form what any of us call “Shtromka”?
Rather than searching for one definition, we followed the studio’s emphasis on fieldwork and open-ended exploration. “Greetings from Shtromka” became a collage-postcard workshop designed to bring many voices into our evolving sense of the place. Each participant contributed their own fragments—elements drawn from memory, curiosity, and speculation—helping to broaden and complicate the collective image we are forming.
Each postcard became a small, intuitive space for participants to interpret Shtromka in their own way. Rather than recording specific site impressions, the workshop encouraged them to play with visual and textual fragments and let new connections appear through cutting, arranging, and writing. In doing so, participants gave form to Shtromka’s shifting character and expanded how we, as a group, understand and imagine the site.
What emerged was not a single portrait, but a collection of viewpoints—each revealing a different way of sensing a place in motion. Together, these postcards reflect the studio’s core idea: that Shtromka is both a real environment and a conceptual lens. They show how the place is shaped not only by its physical terrain or plans for development, but also by the interpretations people bring, the stories they share, and the ways we continually rewrite what Shtromka is and might become.