Urban Dreams

Artist: Emil Mirazchiev, Sevdalina Kochevska, Veronika Tzekova, Vladislav Kostadinov, HR-Stamenov
Location: Plovdiv, Bulgaria
Year of completion: 2012
Researcher: Giusy Checola

The project Urban Dreams is composed by several artistic interventions exploring public and semi-public spaces. The project produced installations, performances and actions involving both artists and citizens, as it aimed at making art interact with the problems of the city as perceived by its inhabitants in daily life. Based on manifold perspectives of diverse Bulgarian artists, with Urban Dreams contemporary art became for the first time a tool for cultural research strategy, and the city turned into a laboratory in progress. The connections between the project, the spaces and its inhabitants has been generated on the base of their historical and social current issues. Artistic methods provided people of a unique way to place and read the urban dreams in their possible contexts, with their wishes, evocations and also resistences.

The massive participation of citizens to the the project demonstrated their need for physycal cultural spaces, and the growing demand for a different visual and spiritual environment. Moreover the process activated by the project played a fundamental role for the election of Plovdiv as European Capital of Culture 2019 and on the future program of revitalisation of the urban areas of the city. Finally, the artistic interventions helped to rethink collectively the role and the dynamics of construction buildings and architectures, and overcame the huge concentration of events in the centre by creating communication with the outskirts.

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