This past weekend on July 15, 2016, Emily and I met with Zaneta Trajkoska to discuss the Colorful Revolution that is taking place in Macedonia. Zaneta is the director of the Macedonian Institute for Media and she has been involved with some of the organizers of these protests taking place as well as journalists who have been out covering the protests.
In our meeting, a point that Zaneta talked about that I found intriguing was a trending hashtag for the revolution. #protestiram, which means “I protest” of one of the hastags used on social media platforms, especially Facebook. This means that even though the protests are a group effort to put in place, each person is there protesting for themselves. Each of them are individuals protesting for their own specific reasons, because of how they are affected by the actions of the government and because of how Macedonia, their home, is being affected.
These protests used to be held every single day at 6 o’clock p.m. and would make their way along a specific route throughout the city. As the months have gone by however, the protests have changed, and now seem to focus on more specific civil movements and do not occur as often as before. There are two reasons Zaneta said these protests are not occurring daily anymore. One reason is that it is now summertime and many people who were involved in the protests are away on holiday and are no longer in Skopje. The second reason is that it is exhausting to participate in protests such as these every single day. After a full day of work, then heading straight to the protests at 6p.m., by the time the protestors get home they just go to bed and repeat this process of work and protesting daily.
When we began this project we were under the assumption that these protests were still happening nightly. It wasn’t until we were already planning to go back to Macedonia that we were informed the protests had become less frequent. Without there being a protest, a lot of the images we were looking for to pair with the audio were impossible to get. After coming back and talking with Meredith, we’ve decided to begin a new project this final week we are here, and then use what we did get while we were in Macedonia to make a separate shorter project on the side. Stay tuned for more updates on our upcoming project focusing on a local community here in Pristina.