Neither a City, Nor a Garden
2024
Vаrtopo Park
A walk through Vartopo Park, where we learn more about the amazing existence of wild gardens in the big city.
Andrea Popyordanova and Francesca Castanetti (an ethnobotanist from Italy) organize an exploratory walk in 2023 in Vartopo, during which participants are invited to discover the urban landscape through plants and their stories.
Vartopo is a vast meadow overlooking Vitosha, located between the Sofia’s Darvenitsa, Mladost and Studentski Town Neighbourhoods. According to the General Development Plan of Sofia, Vartopo is zoned for urban parks and gardens, which means that private properties cannot be built on its territory. However, a large part of its area consists of private land, which cannot be redeemed for the time being, and as a consequence Vartopo cannot be turned into a public park either. Construction sites are growing along its edges, to the point that it is increasingly difficult to find an entrance to it. Where the buildings stop, a meadow begins, which is the habitat of many fruit trees, weeds, but also stray dogs, illegal buildings, two rivers, a monastery and much more.
Unlike a city park with selected and classically beautiful plant species and distinct paths, Vertopo is what it chooses to be in different seasons. This meadow on the edge of Sofia is in its own way a fragment of what the Sofia Plain was before it became densely populated and heavily built up.
The walk lasts about two hours, during which we share knowledge and practices that help us immerse ourselves in this place with all our senses. We become familiar with some of the weeds and grasses in Vartopo, and explore what plants can teach us — about ourselves, about the soil, and about the specific site. During the walk, we discuss ideas and concepts from contemporary ecology and ethnobotany.
Francesca Castagnetti is an ethnobotanist at the Centre for Biocultural Diversity, Kent, and a intern traditional herbalist working in the field of ethnobotany, herbalism and culture. She moves with the seasons between Italy, the UK, Nepal and the Norwegian Arctic – from lighthouses to mountain villages. Francesca learns and teaches about plants and land knowledge using ethnographic methods, but also drawing on theories from ethnobiology, political ecology and indigenous studies. Through knowledge of herbalism and active work with people, Francesca explores community dynamics, storytelling, and rituals as a way to build deep relationships with the land we inhabit.
Andrea Popyordanova is an artist whose creative practice is situated between illustration, book and graphic design. She is interested in how people live and what influence they have on the spaces they inhabit and how they connect with them. In 2021 she completed the project First Line, an imaginary guide to the Sunny Beach coastline and overdevelopment, a theme told through drawings of swimming pools and hotel advertising texts. In 2022, he was a participant in the first edition of the Centre for Social Vision, where she began to work on the theme of Sofia’s unknown and wild green spaces and people’s relationship to them through the projects Orchards and Urban Harvest.
A conversation with Andrea Popyordanova and Francesca Castagnetti can be read here on Journal of Social Vision.
You can read about the publication The Unusable Guide to Vertoppo and its Weeds here (the publication is sold out).
In partnership with the Center for Social Vision.
The project is supported by the Ministry of Culture through the Visual Arts Programme and Culture Moves Europe.
Links
Presentation of an audio guide that can be listened to individually or in a group during a walk through the city