This year artists, researchers, and conductors, as well as concrete, banitsa makers, and bees set out from the city center toward its many peripheries with the aim to understand what we actually do and how it changes Sofia. In this edition, you will encounter projects about invisible labor as a form of sustaining collective life — such as in community cultural centers (a storytelling project by Maria Getova and Elena Stoycheva); early labor — like that of the banitsa maker, a form of care that exists even while we sleep (a performance by Lora Krastva); and the everyday work at the Krasno Selo market, tracing the threads that connect its stalls without entangling them (an installation by Victoria Nikolova and Isun Kim).

We will also move back in time — toward forms of labor from the pre-industrial era of intense physical work (an interactive performance by Kexin Hao), and take a walk through Fondovi Zhilishta — one of Sofia’s historic workers’ neighborhoods — where a choir will sing the memory of the urban plan (with New Choir, Pavel Naydenov, and visual interventions by Vasilena Gankovska). Beyond time, we will also explore other perspectives — those of bees and their organizations, of plants, and of the paths of Sofia’s rivers, whose movements connect different geographies and contexts (a curated walk by Marie de Pasquier).

Sometimes everything we do truly encompasses everything — as when an entire village relocates to begin anew, as in the case of Zhelezhnitsa (a project by Maria Makedonska and Nikola Zambeli). At other times, everything we can do is simply stand in line — feeling like a “like” on social media, without knowing why we are queuing (Jana Romanova’s performance “The Queue is the Game”). Or to ask when a street actually rests (a performance by Silvia Cherneva), and what we do when a hole cannot fill itself (a project by Paola and Anna Maria).

Among the main events this year is Sofia Night Performance, “Choreographies of Labor,” which focuses on different forms of labor — often invisible, often as care — from embodied gestures to collective organizational models (with Yana Romanova, Lora Krasteva, Gergana Dimitrova, Kexin Nao, Silvia Cherneva, Maria Minkova, and others.).
In the second week, we invite you to Opera Ecologica in the Botanical Garden of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, where attention turns to another kind of work (from the Latin opus) — that of plants and more-than-human systems. In the interaction between living and non-living entities, a poetics of interdependence emerges, which we think of as opera — simultaneously work, process, and a celebration of invisible possibilities (with Deyana Stareva and Hione Cerato, Violeta Tsenova and Cemili Raym, Alessia Simonetti and Valentina Scharra, Maria Minkova, Mitko Mitkov and Mona Steinwieder).