Sonic Seeds
18 July 2026, 5:00-6:30 PM
Botanical Garden оf BAS (on Sofia’s Ring Road)
Botanic gardens are living archives: they safeguard plant diversity through collections and seed banks, keeping species available for research, restoration, and future recovery. They also exchange seeds with other gardens in a reciprocal, non-commercial network, helping rare plants circulating, being cultivated, and staying connected across institutions. But how do we represent and envision these gardens as active networks? And how do we position ourselves within this ecology of already composting stories?
Through a sound performance workshop led by cultural heritage and participatory design researcher Violeta Tsenova and sound artist and researcher Jemily Rime, we practise ways of finding our bearings – learning how to attune ourselves to the entanglements of past and present, and of human and “more-than-human” collectives, while reflecting on the role of botanical gardens as repositories of biodiversity and collective memory.
Violeta Тsenova is a Marie Sklodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Hasselt University (Belgium) working on developing a collection of design research methods that use art-based practices to identify different forms of memory in urban and peri-urban environments. Violeta has facilitated various workshop formats – from collaborative history writing, to participatory mapping exploring local ecologies, including power relations, resource flows, social norms and more-than-human actors within community culture-change processes.
Most recently, she co-led a walking and making workshop exploring different water realities to investigate practical, solution-oriented approaches to living with bodies of water. Violeta has created and showcased interventions in National Trust properties (UK) and local festivals and urban rooms (Cambridge, UK).
Jemily Rime is a professor of electronic and produced music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and Research Fellow in Creative Technologies and Immersive Storytelling with ARU’s StoryLab. She focuses on the intersection of music computing, audio production, and storytelling. Her work follows a human-centred approach, integrating methods such as participatory design or co-creation to sound research, looking at immersive and interactive audio, as well as applications of new technologies to music production.
She has worked on creative research dissemination projects with the BBC, XR Stories, Street Life York, the UK Antarctic heritage trust, the Birds of Poole harbour and more. Her musical work has been featured on radios across the world and performed on iconic stages and concert halls in France and the UK.
With financial support from the National Culture Fund, Sofia Municipality and its Mobility and Summer Programmes.
Links
Presentation of an audio guide that can be listened to individually or in a group during a walk through the city