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Направи сам
My name is Ivan
People call me Shteki
I’m from Skopje, from settlement Hrom (area)
Well.. when I was younger,
Skopje was a lot prettier than it is now.
Nowadays all we do is poison ourselves with turbo folk music
and some stupid brainwashing stuff
Young people, students,
who are supposed to be the driving force in this society,
are preoccupied with betting shops
and gossipping around in the neighbourhood at the local cafés.
This is where our inspiration probably comes from,
my inspiration in general,
to start skating, to escape the ongoing monotony in Skopje
So, I realised I feel much better when I skate
You know, just hanging out in the neighbourhood with my friends ..
.. We skate, we mess around..
Петок вечер
It’s really a big problem that people in our society see us skaters,
bladers and bikers as vandals,
hooligans that just walk down the streets and break the monuments or something
-I’ve already told you, this is your second time.
if I see you one more time I’m gonna cause some problems.
There’s 10 of you. I can gather a 100.
‘Go away, stop explaining!’
People throw plastic bags filled with water at us,
we’ve been hit with tomatoes
and once even a jar of Ajvar just popped out of a balcony
The police come, they bother us...
- Damage that’s been made. You jump on these things..
- Nothing’s damaged.
- Hey, I saw the whole thing.
If I hadn’t come here and didn’t see it, okay.
- And what exactly did you see?
- Hey listen here, don’t try to be smart,
I can take you to the police station for this complaint.
So now I could just freely pick you all up, take you over there
and file charges against you.
- Well was it you who saw us or someone from upstairs called you?
- It was me young man, me!
- Okay, we’re making noise, that’s fine. But we’re not breaking anything.
There’s this skatepark in Karposh 4 that is completely dysfunctional
and that was built just so we could say there’s a skatepark in Skopje
The problem here is that this facility is not visited
by those who should visit it.
-What’s wrong with the skatepark?
-Watch. I’m gonna show him what’s wrong with this skatepark.
You saw the height I reached?
Well it should launch me into the air, that’s what’s wrong.
You see this here? Well this shouldn’t be here.
It should end here so when you get there
you can kinda hook on to the rail on the coping,
and if you’re a pro skater you should boost above it and come back,
but that couldn’t possibly happen because of that *** over there.
Another thing. Here I’m pumping,
I go up, I come back and what the fu*k am I doing here?
See? I got no speed.
It’s not possible, see, the other one is pretty much the same sh*t,
it’s just that I’m a pus*y and I can’t roll from there.
-At least you admit it!
-Nothing. The second time you go down, no way,
you reach much lower, and then again even lower and again
and you end up in the middle and you’re not happy at all
though this is supposed to make you happy
The only good thing about this skatepark
is that you can use this one and this one here,
but for fuc*** sake, an entire skate park for just two elements.
That’s not cool.
-Hey where did he go?
-There he is, he’s handing out flyers.
-Well I’m gonna go buy him a beer.
-Hey! Cool T-shirt dude!
Because of the inability to attain our goals as individuals
and to solve the problems we have in this city
when it comes to skateboarding,
we decided to start an organisation,
- a Macedonian skateboarding association (SAM),
and we made getting a professional skatepark its primary goal.
We started a project through SAM organisation
a sketch plan for a skatepark.
We made a 3D model of it along with technical drawings,
dimensions and all.
There were some mayoral elections just a few months ago.
We got a call from the City Hall
because these guys supposedly wanted to build a skate park.
They contacted us, we went there, we talked.
It all seemed pretty promising at first,
they were up for investing money to build a skatepark,
so we handed in the whole project.
-...to promote a project that we’re working on
and that’s building a skatepark.
So, this skatepark is going to be built according to the requirements
of the standards established for a park of this kind.
-We’re currently working on another project,
out of the skatepark,
illegally.
SAM 2014,
to oppose the project Skopje 2014.
At least we’re doing something useful. For a change, you know.
-Why didn’t you fill the sack dude? So, is this how it is?
-Yeah.
-Oh well, nothing then. You should’ve filled the sack dude.
- With what?
-With a bucket.
-With this?
-Yes. -Well wasn’t it no good?
-Bro, the police are here.
-Where?
-A police van has just passed in front of us. Over there.
-So what, big deal!
-There are cops where we park.
-Who gives a sh*t, fu*k ‘em!
We act in many different ways, we try to build our own equipment.
We’ve recently made a grind rail.
It’s a long rail of about 4-5m with two different heights,
with all the proper bendings
and we take it everywhere with us, wherever we go.
We keep it under the train station most of the time.
-What’s up Igor?
-I have no idea!
-Where were you? At a kafeana maybe?
-Naah. At the skate park.
It’s actually not that hard for us to make our own equipment.
We’ll make it ourselves, but the main problem is
that we don’t have where to place it.
We don’t have a location in the city where we can put those elements.
Sometimes people come, they take them and sell them for scrap metal (iron).
And sometimes people from Parks and Green Spaces (Services)
or Communal Utilities come and throw our elements in the river Vardar,
which is a little bit absurd.
The skate scene has expanded a lot recently.
There are lots of new people and even little kids that skate.
It’s been expanding slowly in the past three years
but it’s not that great compared to the one in the past.
There used to be a good skate scene around here,
and all of a sudden they knocked down the skatepark and the scene stopped growing
and there were literally only 5 skaters left in the city.
So we started building things all over again,
and the scene started to grow and to go back to what it should be,
or at least something alike.
We’re still far from it all and I think that things won’t start to take off
until we get a skatepark.
In fact, skaters want nothing more than to leave them alone and let them skate.
All they need is for people to stop bothering them
and for them to have their own place in the city.
That’s all the skaters need. 0:14:39.400,1193:02:47.295 And they’ll be over the moon