Brief Biography:
Antonina Ilieva is an architect with an interest in the deliberate search for and constant exchange between architectural theory and practice, urban space, and the education and awareness of these topics in Bulgaria. Currently one quarter of studio dontDIY - http://dontdiystudio.com/, Antonina Ilieva has been working in parallel since 2012 on her PhD research on the phenomenon of the contemporary Japanese house as a specific social, historical, economic and theoretical model that raises questions about the future of the built environment globally.
On urban festivals and bringing people closer to the city
the year 2017 brought Sofia at least two events that I personally excitedly reported as memorable in terms of the development of urban culture here - the first edition of the White Rabbit street festival and another edition of the Kvartal Festival. Urban events seemingly small in scale and potential for impact.
Here, for example, is why I felt that White Rabbit, the new street festival (which I think also has the potential to keep happening) was an urban phenomenon I wanted to celebrate and commemorate:
- because of the location and the fact that someone has carefully considered its potential - the buildings as decor; the width-to-height ratio of this stretch of street, surprisingly different from the adjacent Shishman stretch of the same street (Ivan Vazov); the strip of sky highlighted by this ratio;
- the will to recognize and create a spirit of place (PlaceMaking) - now-vivid vs. normally-vivid; the scene to which the strip of sky and the strip of grass lead;
- the content and the way it is presented - the choice of music; the selection of different kinds of cultural products; their presence rather than their presentation; the calm; the concentration of the experience, emphasising the otherness of that moment there and now, compared to the same moment on the neighbouring streets;
- the initiative is private, i.e. each of us can initiate new and different events with a "butterfly effect" towards the urban society by example and by analogy.
Sofia is a city of historical complexity,which can betruly exciting when looked at objectively and without fretting about previous historical periods. It sits at the foot of a mountain, is well equipped with parks and public spaces, and although not coherently planned, is a treasure trove of buildings and infrastructure whosenarrative stretches from antiquity, through the early architecture of the industrial era, the remarkably sympathetic localreading of modernism, the ambiguous architecture of the socialist era, the controversial late postmodernism, right through to the gradually emergingcontemporary architecture.This eclectic mix creates a tension that could offer much to the exploratory mind and eye, but for a civil society in a state of prolonged transition, the relationship between the city as a built environment and its people is not an easy one.
The outdateddichotomous reading of cities, in which private and public, as well as nature and architecture, are seen as polar opposites, is a concept that all post-industrial societies struggle to overcome. Although this challenge is even more pronounced in cities such as Bulgaria's, and Sofia in particular, which have undergone serious political, economic and social changes in the last two decades , we can safely say that within the last 5 to 10 years, a new positive page has been turned in the development of urban culture in Sofia.
So what changes the attitude of citizens from an apatheticbelief that the public urban environment is shaped solely by the state and business, to an exponentially growing interest in the city's places and an enthusiastic desire to proactively adapt and changethem ? "Accumulating personal experience ingetting to knowand interacting with the city" seems like the most likely answer. Over the last decade , cultural festivals in Sofia have become a tool for uncovering the potential of existing spaces, buildings and infrastructure in the city and for inviting citizens to reclaim and repopulate them. When it comes toreclaiming long-neglected or neglected urban areas, raising awareness of their potential as reservoirs and generators of culture, and forging new connections between them and the people, all of the initiatives chosen below are important reactivators of the 'spirit of place' and essential to mention.
One Architecture Week (former Sofia Architecture Week)
Amongst the largest in scale and impact on the list, One Architecture Week is and hopefully will remain an annual international festival of architecture and urbanism organised by the contemporary culture platform EDNO. The festival startedin 2008 as a two-day architecture conference in Sofia and has grown into an important public event with a duration and impact well beyond one week a year, stimulating a broad professional and public debate on sustainable social and architectural practices. Over the years, the festival has opened to public access a series of generally inaccessiblebuildings and spaces in Sofia, such as the former Party House (now the National Assembly Office), the Sofia Public Mineral Baths, the National Palace of Culture in its entirety, and , addressing the issue of centralization, has gradually moved most of its extensive program to Plovdiv.
One Design Week (former Sofia Design Week)
Also run by the EDNO platform, One Design Week is an international annual festival of design and visual culture that has been running since 2009 and has been highly successful in bringing sustainable and sensible design practices from around the world to the forefront through a host of educational and interactive events aimed equally at professional design audiences, members of the public and children. Its contribution to urban culture and knowledge of the city is further enhanced by the fact that each year the festival takes place in no fewer than 50 locations across Sofia, ranging from hard-to-reach institutional buildings, to abandoned sites with the potential to be revived, to small private galleries and art shops, and explicitly encourages visitors to explore all 50 venues through a game with design prizes.
Dating back the longest among the participants on this list, Sofia Underground is an international contemporary art and performance festival founded in the 1990s as a reaction to the social crisis of the time. Apart from its legendary status in the contemporary Bulgarian artistic environment, thanks to its marked sensitivity to social processes and the dynamics of the local art scene, Sofia Underground is also known for systematically placing little-known locations in the city at the centre of the discussion about art and culture, as its latest edition in the NDK dungeons is a telling illustration of this.
A joint initiative of international arts organisations, the festival has been running since 2006, inhabiting the unique abandoned Water Tower, a beloved but little-known landmark hidden among the modern apartment buildings in the Lozenets district.
A newer, but also now established addition to the cultural festival scene that has played an enduring and recognizable role in strengthening the relationship between man and urban environment since 2013, DOMA Art Fest is on a mission to increase public engagement with culture and urban spaces by presenting relevant international contemporary art and culture phenomena each year in the context of a host of underground locations in Sofia and Plovdiv that are remarkable in their own right.