Living Grounds

As part of the Nine Elephants Festival, we are presenting the project Living Grounds by GRADOSCOPE as part of our public programme. Developed in partnership with the festival and in resonance with this year’s thematic focus, the project brings together scientific research, artistic practices, and civic participation through an interdisciplinary approach that foregrounds urban soils as a living and dynamic ecosystem, inviting new ways of understanding and engaging with them.

Living Grounds operates as an open urban laboratory, bringing together scientific research and civic participation. Researchers from the Climate, Atmosphere and Water Research Institute at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and the Bulgarian Biodiversity Foundation conduct field studies, collect samples, and carry out laboratory analyses of soil quality and biodiversity. The project then engages citizens through a series of workshops and educational walks that invite participants to explore urban soils and biodiversity firsthand. To make these complex processes more accessible and tangible, artists collaborate closely with scientists, helping translate research into experiences that foster a broader public understanding of the vital role soils play in urban life.

The research takes place simultaneously at four different locations across Sofia. As part of the festival, we will visit one of the project’s sites together – Robov Dol Park (Slatina district)—where the event includes a guided walk, the collection of field observations, and a creative workshop for collective mapping.
A special focus of this festival edition is the partnership with the Recipes for the Future team (Elena Balabanska, Eleonora Edreva, and Izabela Markova), with whom we also collaborated last year. As part of the current project, they are developing a creative map of the park as a tool with a dual function: on the one hand, to visualise scientific data and findings from field research on the soil, and on the other, to collect and activate participants’ subjective impressions, associations, and creative interpretations. In this way, the map becomes a living archive of the place, combining knowledge, experience, and imagination.