Once again, it has been proven that a good idea doesn’t require large budgets or complex strategies. If it’s the right one, it can often become an unexpected force that suddenly appears and solves the problem.
This one we write about, was unfortunately initiated by an unexpected force as well: a supercell storm that struck Šid in June 2023, leaving behind devastated Srem landscapes, whose beauty once inspired some of the most remarkable works of Sava Šumanović.
When the trees painted by Sava Šumanović are destroyed, it is not merely an ecological or urban issue for the local community—it becomes a matter of preserving national cultural heritage.
Leo Burnett Belgrade and Headmade, with a touch of creativity, artificial intelligence, and teamwork, conceived and implemented a CSR project through a donor auction aimed at revitalizing the devastated area. We created unique reproductions of Šumanović’s original works by extracting elements of the trees destroyed in the supercell storm, encouraging socially responsible companies to purchase these modified reproductions of Sava’s Srem landscapes to help restore Šid and its surroundings as a source of artistic inspiration.
Using AI-based tools and guided by Sava’s distinctive “Kako znam i umem” (“As best I can”) style, we employed a technique called Constructive Extractionism to generate replicas, answering the question of how Šumanović’s landscapes might look if he had painted them in 2023.
At the donor auction we organized at the “Sava Šumanović” Gallery, all 18 offered reproductions were purchased, and the total proceeds were donated by the Gallery to the local government for planting new trees. Additionally, a Gold Effie award was presented to us on the red carpet of the White Palace for the campaign “Sava Šumanović to the Fallen Trees” in the Non-Profit – Small Budgets category.
