Inter-block Wanderings

Sapromat, together with anthropologist Konstantin Georgiev, invited especially for the project, create Inter-Block Wanderings – an audio walk that guides us in a fantastical way through the streets of the Kyulutsite neighbourhood. In the process, the artists work with archival documents and field research to construct a narrative that looks at the functions of the neighbourhood’s buildings and its invisible infrastructural logics, moving beyond specific events and historical periods.
An important role in this narrative is played by the imaginary “Center for Urban Studies,” while the participants in the walk become its collaborators. The artists combine found objects and imagined stories within these inter-block wanderings, opening windows onto the neighbourhood’s past and future and all its possible identities. Cities are at once places of everyday life and central industrial and transport hubs – sometimes these functions exist side by side, and the experience of these boundaries differs for each of us.

At the very beginning of the walk, all the attendees are given tools with which they can point out elements important for the imagination and the city – most often these turn out to be things that no one would have paid attention to. The colour blue serves as a code and allows all participants to recognise what others have found or pointed out as interesting. The viewfinders are also in this colour to allow you to look at a particular detail and distinguish it from everything around. The poster itself has one giant hole in the middle. In time, we see that every possible point of view would also be the fruit of the imaginary Center for Urban Studies research.

Writer Todora Radeva shares: “Kosio, Michaela and Boris offered us a voice, a blue thread and a frame through which the city around us did not narrow, but on the contrary – the more we focused our attention on our surroundings and sank into the questions that came through the headphones, the more the city grew – through Perek’s ‘method’ of describing a place; through the reflections around boundaries and different functional zones; through the disagreements, resistances and everyday practices that change the city; through the filter provided to us; through the inspiration to leave our marks on the space and to search for the alternative (or just personal) history.”

You can go through Inter-block Wanderings yourself – the audio guide is available here(link), and you can prepare your own blue viewfinder. Starting point: the garden at 13A “Panayot Volov” Street.