A change from within

Photo: ANBI (CC) commons.wikimedia.org

Torba Show: Fighting plastic bags with fashion

The city’s transformation has manifested itself even in tiny details. Five years ago, for example, takeaway coffee for the average Minsk citizen was something out of an American film. Now you can get one on every corner. Along with the development of restaurants and street food culture, the city has seen a boom in local social initiatives. Many of them came into being thanks to the Social Weekend – the first Belarusian contest of social projects that has been taking place twice a year since 2013.

The awardees of the Social Weekend – local social, ecological, urban, inclusive initiatives – receive mentoring and financial support to bring their ideas into reality. One of the winners from last’s year competition was a project called Torba Show, which aims to fight the excessive consumption of plastic bags. And their main weapon is fashion.

This problem is evident to anyone who has been to any Belarusian grocery shop; the excessive amount of plastic bags, which are handed out for free to customers, is very noticeable. Like many other post-Soviet countries, Belarus has only started to become aware of ecological issues – be it recycling, plastic consumption or air pollution. That is why local ecological initiatives play a big role.

The idea for Torba Show first came from a former radio journalist, Sasha Kulbickaja, who studied at Ecostart, an ecological centre for youth. “The most poignant thing that happened to me then – and maybe the most poignant thing in my whole life – was a trip to a landfill site,” Sasha recalls. “At this graveyard of trash, I realised that the most unnecessary things we use, for five minutes of our lives, like plastic cups or straws will be staying there for a long-long time. I got very scared then.”

Another thing that drew her attention was plastic bags. “A plastic bag is a very simple and silly thing, very useless, but no one talks about how harmful it is to our environment,” Sasha says. Together with her friend Katya, a communications specialist and talented seamstress, she wants to offer an alternative to the plastic bag: torba – an easy-to-carry cotton bag that can become a stylish accessory for every modern citizen of Minsk.

The two young women organise workshops where they teach people how to make their own bags and discuss various ecological issues. The first workshop took place in December 2016. Back then they did not expect their idea would attract so many people. “We were so shocked when twice as many people signed up for our second workshop,” Katya says. “So we had to organise a third one and so on…” The workshops always gather a diverse group of people, including seniors and men.

First and foremost, Sasha and Katya want to stress the design and fashion elements of their project in order to get away from the so-called “ecological ghetto”. By creating a new stylish item, they want to show that a plastic bag “is not cool anymore”. In the last couple months the Torba Show has been on tour organising workshops in nearly every city of the Minsk region. Apart from the regular bimonthly workshops, Katya and Sasha produce torbas in limited editions based on orders. In March they manufactured 500 cotton bags for the international TEDx conference in Minsk and received many other commissions since then. To be sure, it is hard to produce such a large volume by hand, so the two women found an inclusive manufacturer to help them out.  

Yet a pressing issue for them is to make the project sustainable – only then can change be reached on a wider scale. Another big dream is to see a “zero waste” shop in Minsk with no plastic bags. And, of course, to see citizens of Minsk with torbas on their shoulders.

Motolko, help us out!

The centre of Minsk may be clean and renovated, but further into the suburbs more and more everyday urban issues become visible: potholes on the roads, unregulated parking, lack of pedestrian crossings and buildings in poor condition. All of these issues should be taken care of by the district administration, but often nothing is done unless someone files a complaint. And there is no Minsk citizen who is better at this than Anton Motolko.

Anton became famous as a photographer and blogger after taking pictures of two big events in the Belarusian capital: the terrorist attack at the city metro in April 2011 and the protests of May-August 2011. He had sold his pictures to news agencies and published them on his blog where his posts reached 900,000 views per month. It was then that he realised one can start a discussion and bring about change just by posting pictures online.

Seven years later, Anton still does photography for a living, but most of the time he is helping people reach the local authorities to change small things in their daily lives. “I want to show people through my example that everyone can change the things around them if they want to,” he explains. Belarusian citizens are very keen on complaining, either at home or on Facebook, but very few take action. At the same time, in recent years it has become easier for citizens to file a complaint to the local administration: a new law in 2011 allowed citizens to do that online.

“So why can one write an emotional post on Facebook and not file an official complaint at the same time? You can just copy and paste it, really,” Anton wonders. However, he has noticed an increase in the number of people who also use it. According to him, 80 per cent of those issues can be solved by a simple request.

Anton has gathered all of his civic activities on his website “Motolko, help me out!” It is a kitschy name but a call to action, he explains. He believes that Belarusians always want a leader who will come and tell them what to do – be it Alyaksandr Lukashenka or historical leaders like Konstanty Kalinowski or Tadeusz Kościuszko. “Of course Motolko cannot come to everyone and help, but he can give advice, and if following this advice you are not getting a result… we can talk about it further,” he says smiling.

Via a form on his website, citizens can send a message asking for a consultation. More often, however, Anton gets requests via social media. Problems vary from local household issues to deforestation or big industrial constructions. What Anton is doing for free in his spare time is something that would normally be done by the Public Chamber of the City Hall. In order for the government to take on this role, Anton says, huge structural changes are needed: the city authorities should go online and take care of people’s complaints.

Anton has once offered his consultancy services to the Minsk Executive Committee, but encountered zero concern on their side. Using his name and expertise, Anton could have gone into politics himself, but he has no interest in it. “It is easier to change things from outside of the system than from within,” he says. His plan is to move towards CSR (corporate social responsibility) business support in order to be able to consult businesses and to do something for the benefit of the people, making this a full-time, paid activity.

“We are living in a time of liberalisation in Belarus and we have to seize the moment, because you never know when the situation will become tough again for activists,” he says.

Reinventing a city

If Anton is the one who can explain how to get local authorities do what they should, a group of bright enthusiasts from the Minsk Urban Platform can gladly teach one how to reinvent their own public space. No matter what kind of project they are working on – be it reorganising public yards, setting up new playgrounds, or educational events such as open lectures and urban workshops – their goal is clear: mobilise local residents and get them to think about what they want their city to be like.

Andrei and Nadezhda, both working for the platform, have a more scientific term for this – “participatory urbanism”. It is an approach aimed at making individual citizens proactive in their involvement with the city in general and with their neighbourhood in particular. By now, the platform has a number of participatory projects that were successfully finalised and maintained by the locals themselves. Yet with all its practical activity, the platform also seeks to expand the already existing educational tradition.

“I was doing my master’s in critical urban studies at the European Humanities University in Vilnius when I met a group of architecture students on one of the Minsk architectural forums. We thought it would be great to bring sociology and architecture together, and this was how the platform was born,” says Andrei. They started with lectures and discussions, aiming to build up an interdisciplinary knowledge base. All the materials are now available on the platform and can be accessed freely.

Nadezhda joined the team, already conducting the first stage of a participatory project in Autazavod, one of Minsk’s industrial districts. This was the moment when the platform’s purely educational activity shifted towards a more practical area of expertise. Autazavod opened a series of “alternative courtyard” projects, resulting in a substantial transformation of several public courtyards with the direct participation of Minsk citizens.

Apart from the evident lack of co-operation from the local authorities – which is a common issue in many post-Soviet countries – the platform has faced a more serious problem when working with the local residents. “The total distrust of the citizens,” says Nadezhda. “Whenever we start working on a project, people always get suspicious. And in order to get them involved, we first have to win their trust by promoting our ideas through the most active locals and, of course, through the media.”

Yet Nadezhda and Andrei point out that the distrust of the local residents comes together with their inability to talk and listen to each other. “People are not used to having their opinion heard,” explains Andrei. “Especially when it is about the urban environment they live in. So, they have no idea how to carry out a fruitful discussion in order to find a compromise.” Nadezhda relates this to the traditional education. “We are taught not to think and express our opinion. Neither to reflect upon what is happening around us,” she adds.  

According to Andrei and Nadezhda, people from Belarus still do not realise that their living space, as well as many other things in their everyday life, could be different which may be the major reason why they are not ready to actively change it. In spite of all the difficulties the platform faces, they are fighting one step beyond well-planned parks and functional benches. Their ultimate goal is to cultivate a love of the city among its inhabitants by teaching them how to make it a better place to live in together.

Natalia Smolentceva is a freelance journalist based in Germany. She has a master’s in global communication and international journalism and is currently undertaking a traineeship at Deutsche Welle.

Varvara Morozova is a freelance journalist based in Berlin. She is also a co-manager of the Voices of Change project which aims to tell stories of young people from struggling democracies around Eastern Europe.

belarus, Minsk, Urban initiatives