Reporting by Temenouzhka Zaharieva. Images by Mihail Novakov.
Sofia Design Week, the international design festival of Bulgaria, is organized by the cultural platform EDNO and takes place in Sofia every June since 2009. Its fourth edition entitled In Context will include over 100 events—exhibitions, workshops, lectures, screenings and parties.
This year, events kick off today, June 1st, but the preliminary program has already begun. The first exhibition opened on April 28 at the Sofia City Art Gallery—100 miniatures of classical chairs in scale 1: 6. from the collection of Vitra Design Museum (Germany). Since the history of design assigns the chair a central role, the exhibition of these coveted collector's items—with the help of photographs, original sketches and chronological tables—aims to tell the story of contemporary design.
Image courtesy of Ada Nikolova
On May 24th—the Bulgarian Education and Culture, and Slavonic Literature Day—the exhibition Alfapretation Bulgaria opened. In 2007, the year Bulgaria joined the European Union, the Cyrillic alphabet became the third official alphabet in the EU. Alfapretation Bulgaria is a project that tries to interprete the Cyrillic alphabet as a unifying code of cultural symbols of identity. For the project all 30 letters were (quite subjectively) associated with 30 symbols of Bulgaria's daily life, values and mentality—like banitsa, roses, tobacco, no, Sofia, bread, etc. These letter/word combinations were distributed as an inspiration among fifteen Bulgarian designers and Alphapretation presents their interpretations.
But the most interesting is yet to come—there will be more than 50 exhibitions, many workshops and lectures. What we are looking forward to see this year:
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