Spontaneous Nature - Mapping and Making Sense
2025
Around Stochna Gara
Within Nine Elephants Gradoscope carries out the first action of the project Common Grounds for exploring the urban nature around Stochna Gara. The walk takes participants through abandoned urban spaces such as the channel of the Vladayska River and the disused railway areas around Stochna Gara.
Common Grounds (translated as “Shared Ground”) is an initiative that brings together artists, researchers, and local communities in conversations and actions for the protection and restoration of soil in both urban and rural areas.
Led by three organizations and partners – La Citadelle de Marseille (France), Gradoscope (Bulgaria), and Fundación RIA (Spain) – the project seeks sustainable solutions to ecological, democratic, and urban challenges related to the regeneration of contaminated soils across different types of terrain.
Throughout 2025 the project explores diverse perspectives and human interactions with the environment in order to offer a new understanding of the world we inhabit.
As preparation for the project, within Nine Elephants, Gradoscope carries out the first action of the Common Grounds project, exploring the urban nature around Stochna Gara.
The walk takes us through abandoned urban spaces such as the channel of the Vladayska River and the disused railway areas around Stochna Gara.
With the help of “One Tree” – specialists in landscape planning and biodiversity researchers from the Institute of Circular Economy, we map the spontaneous development of nature in unmanaged urban environments and discuss how we should coexist with different species, how to care for such urban nature and how citizens and artists can become part of this process.
Stoczna Station, Sofia (Bulgaria) – an abandoned freight railway station in the centre of Sofia, where the Gradoscope Association, experts, institutions and citizens are working on a widely shared concept for the future uses of the site. The industrial past of the location has invariably impacted and partially contaminated the soil. This raises an important question in the regeneration process: how can the new functions of the building and the public spaces around it also address soil contamination? Since 2021 Gradoscope has been working on the regeneration of the area as a living and connecting urban part.
Ina Valkanova is an architect, urbanist and researcher. She is co-founder of GRADOSCOP – a collective for urban transformation. She studied architecture at RWTH Aachen and the University of the Arts in Berlin. From 2019 to 2024 she is a PhD student at ETH Zürich, where she is researching the relationship between industry and environment in the Thracian Economic Zone in Plovdiv with the Newrope team. She has worked as an architect with Alvaro Siza in Porto and Benthem Crouwel in Amsterdam, participated in the creation of Vision for Sofia as Investment and Innovation Coordinator and lectured at the Copenhagen and Belgrade Architecture Weeks.
With financial support from Creative Europe.
Links
Presentation of an audio guide that can be listened to individually or in a group during a walk through the city