SIREN SOUP

There was an old saying that a foreigner who drank from the once-famous Rijeka fountain, would be struck by a fresh, love-inducing potion causing him to fall in love with the city. Captivated by its enchanting allure, he would be compelled to stay in Rijeka and marry a girl from Rijeka, as if under the spell of a siren’s call.

This folktale told us all we needed to know to jump headfirst into the sea of possibility of the project.

Siren Soup was born as a part of a two-week workshop at MEDS Rijeka 2025, with the goal of deep diving into the city’s mythology and collective memory, exploring the city’s culture through all means and media necessary to stimulate all five senses: video editing, sound design, narrative storytelling, cooking, and preparing the exhibition in the abandoned Brajda Marketplace: a space that carries the echoes of memory and encounter.

The soup was brewed and the participants had a taste. The universe conspired to have everything go wonderfully awry in every possible way, and to have the Siren Soup Crew share a closeness usually reserved for old friends.

This led to the participants and tutors alike pouring their hearts out, where everyone learned so much from everyone else. And in the end, it provided the space for everyone to share intimate parts of themselves in the form of artworks.

It could not have been anywhere else, with anyone else, or any other time.

The parts of ourselves we shared with the world are as follows:

Framed Alibi by Everyone ;)

Framed Alibi is a collective rotoscoping exercise that explored animation through frame-by-frame drawing.

Each participant recorded a four-second video, which was then broken into 42 printed frames. Using transparent paper, we traced, altered, and re-imagined the sequences.

The individual fragments were reassembled into a single narrative, with the sound added to weave them into one coherent whole.

The result is about the shared process, capturing the workshop experience moment by moment, frame by frame and line by line.

Warm Winds Ary Lieberwirth

During the MEDS Workshops 2025, I had the pleasure of not only facilitating the Siren Soup project as a tutor, but also creating a small passion project of my own.

The result is the short film Warm Winds, in which I describe a profound and utterly surprising experience I had during my stay in Rijeka.

The film’s narrative is based on a poem I wrote and later used as the voiceover. The visuals consist of nighttime footage of the streets, captured with my phone camera.

To enhance the atmosphere, I also composed a soundtrack on one of the many pianos that happened to be conveniently placed around our accommodation.

For a Few Days

Doruk Sivri

In the first week of the MEDS Workshop, several small productions - storytelling, cooking, quick question-answer sessions - helped the Siren Soup participants and tutors connect not only with each other’s names, but also with their characters. For me, these activities became a way to begin finding my own narrative through Rijeka.

Reflecting before the final project, I realized that all of my productions - and even my behavior during the workshop - were about discovery: sometimes appearing as a desire to be discovered myself, and sometimes as an effort to bring different things together in order to discover something new. With this awareness, I began writing freely without questioning whether it was enough, and through this I unconsciously had a narrative that later became the basis for the video.

Together with the tutors, we discussed visuals, drew storyboards, then filmed the shots and recorded the narration of my text.

For a Few Days avoids heavy metaphors in order to tell the story more directly, but it still leaves space for curiosity - you might wonder who “she” is. Feel as if you’ve stumbled upon a metal cup while searching for treasure, or experience the strangeness of cutting into a kiwi to reveal its hidden inside.

Rijeka in 575

Jason O’Kelly

Rijeka in 575 is an exploration of the city with the aim of putting the viewer alongside me on my adventure around the city.

Through my first few days of exploration, I quickly realised that the best thing I could do for the city was to let it speak for itself through its beautiful chaos and places of reflection.

I wanted the viewer to not only see what I see in the city, but to feel like they found it themselves. The chaotic scene changing and movement in the bridging sections give the viewer the feeling of movement and exploration, while the still shots give them the feeling I got from discovering these locations.

A sense of wonder and peace.

The haikus I wrote about each of the 5 still shot locations help me to connect the viewer to how I felt at that moment, so that they can share in my emotion.

I just hope that Rijeka in 575 helped all those who saw it to feel the magic that I felt as Rijeka embraced me and showed me her spirit.

Echoes Between Us

Miona Racić

During the MEDS Workshops 2025, I was inspired by the city of Rijeka, but most of all by the people who became like family to me during the Siren Soup workshop.

My project Echoes Between Us is a poeticromantic monologue in dialogue form between myself and an unknown entity. The narrative follows the paths I walked from Rječina, across Korzo and the market, all the way to the beach, where I experienced the city as if it were speaking to me and awakening feelings I hadn’t felt in a long time.

Throughout the work, sound plays continuously, recorded directly from the city’s atmosphere. I combined these ambient recordings with photographic typologiesand frame sequence animations of scanned textures and patterns that capture the aura of Rijeka.

As my main tool, I used a hand scanner to collect surfaces and details, layering them into a visual and sonic dialogue that reflects my inner experience of the city.

A Letter to my Anonymous Local Guide

Mo Abdelbary

"You’ve reached out & showed me your place. I’ll follow your steps, without knowing your face."

The snippet is an unfinished journey of exploring a city where an unknown person spreads their tag in graffiti all over theirhometown. Is it signaling something? Is the message open to the explorer?

It is an intervention of sorts, not intended for interpretation, rather a state of existence in a certain place and time.

Will this journey ever end?

Lost and Found

Nini Mosi & Mo Abdelbary

Lost and Found is a short film about the narrative of human existence, inspired by my personal journey during MEDS 2025 in Rijeka.

While exploring the city and later wandering into a forest andruined buildings, I developed the idea of a girl who appears from nowhere, lost and empty, until a force symbolized by a butterfly leads her toward a door, representing the search for meaning.

Instead of waiting endlessly, she breaks through, enters, and transforms into a butterfly herself - revealing that one must save oneself rather than wait to be saved.

This reinterpretation of Franz Kafka’s fable replaces passive waiting with active transformation.

Together with my companion Mobary, we filmed the piece on a phone in the same forest, and I brought it to life using rotoscoping on Procreate, mixed with editing on Premiere Pro, blending live action with animation to express my own rebirth: I was lost, and in Rijeka, I was found.

Don’t You Forget About Me

Mariam Oueida

It’s the echo of what we lived in Rijeka. In that workshop, something rare happened: we didn’t just work side by side, we collided into each other’s worlds.

Each of us carried their own character, their own silence, their own fire and yet, in the strange alchemy of those days, we connected, deeply,instinctively.

We came together as strangers, each carrying their own character and rhythm, yet somehow, we fit like pieces of a puzzle that were waiting for this exact moment.

Through my lens, I tried to hold onto it all: the way we walked through the streets of Rijeka, the way we worked side by side, the way we laughed, creating memories in between sketches and ideas.

Every frame holds not just faces, but fragments of a feeling too rare to fade.

The song, Don’t You Forget About Me, echoes from the film The Breakfast Club, where every character stood out, yet together they became something bigger.

That’s how I see us: each of us unique, yet together, unforgettable.

And the song carries a wish and a promise.

We cannot let time steal this away. No matter where we go after this workshop, we carry a piece of Rijeka, and of each other, always.

A Tide of Whispers

Leontina Paunovska

A Tide of Whispers unfolds as a three-part journey through fog, isolation, and exchange. Visitors are placed between observer and intruder, moving through shifting thresholds of perception and intimacy.

The Call immerses them in a responsive seascape of fog, light, and algorithmic currents. Moonlit reflections blur surface and depth, echoing the elusive pull of a siren’s voice.

A Corridor of Whispers rises as a tower of stacked docks, both vessel and barricade. A veiled body at its base signals unreachable presence, turning space into an architecture of solitude and distance.

The Trade invites participation: bottles containing fragments of memory and confession can only be taken in exchange for something left behind. This ritual creates a living archive of vulnerability, where stories overlap and circulate.

Installed in Rijeka’s abandoned marketplace, A Tide of Whispers transforms a site of commerce into one of encounter and myth, mapping terrains of anxiety, loneliness, and release, through the means of code, construction, and storytelling.

A Temple of Her Shady Maher and by her

A Temple of Her is a personal work of self-exploration through narrative.

The overwhelming tide of raw emotion that overcame me during the 2 week period of the MEDS workshop dictated that I make a short film of 4 chapters exploring states of loneliness, lostness, longing and letting go.

Each chapter was guided by a narrated poem.

Each unfolded in a single unbroken shot.

Each was captured by a phone camera in one attempt by someone who, in those fleeting days, reached in through my chest and touched my beating heart.

Unembellished by editing, and true to my core, it was an act of therapeutical repercussions.

It demanded to be realised with utmost immediacy, was shown during the exhibition, and then lost in the great fire of my heart.

In an attempt to be true to the emotions that brought it into being, and to protect the sanctity of the shared experience, it is not to be exhibited again.

A Temple of Her was never meant to be consumed, or to entertain, but as an offering cast into a night of shooting stars, to deliver some moments of intimacy to those who matter.

All of these works were curated and exhibited in the abandoned Brajda Marketplace, a space that itself carries the echoes of memory, trade, and encounter, and shall carry fragments of our memories within.

That was Brajda Marketplace,shaped byour stories, our shadows and our screams.

During the two weeks of Siren Soup, participants were introduced to techniques such as urban sketching, rotoscoping, 3D animation, sound design, video editing and storytelling.

Yet the workshop quickly shifted beyond questions of technical mastery.What mattered was not perfection, but truth: each participant finding a medium through which to translate inner experience into a shared offering.The results were diverse: short films, installations, drawings, lies, soundscapes, and stories.

To the Siren Soup Crew, and to the Sirens we meet along the way.

Created and Curated by MoAbdelbary, Vlad Georgiev, Ary Lieberwirth, Shady Maher, Hannah McCarthy, Nini Mosi, Jason O’Kelly, Mariam Oueida, Leontina Paunovska, Miona Racić and Doruk Sivri.

as a part of the SSS Crew, in MEDS Workshop ’25

This project would not have been possible without everyone at MEDS who worked tirelessly to organize and help, making sure this becomes an unforgettable experience. Thank you all.

Special thanks to Rijeka, the city of textures, for giving us everything we could have possibly needed...