“A Frame from the Textile” – A Theatrical Walk Through the Memory of a School

Alongside its artistic residency, the Metamorphosis of Workwear project also engages deeply with the local community in Gabrovo through the collection of oral histories. These stories – shared by individuals connected to the region’s industrial past – have been transformed into a work of art. Over the past month, the project team conducted a series of interviews that revived the memories of people whose lives were closely tied to the former Textile High School – now the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Center.

In partnership with playwright and director Martina Novakova*, the collected stories were adapted into a script for a verbatim theatre performance – a form of “walking theatre” that took place on May 2 and 3 at the Center. Audiences were invited into the building, guided by the authentic voices of former students, teachers, local officials, neighbors, and tour guides – embodied by actresses from Gabrovo’s Racho Stoyanov Drama Theatre: Nadezhda Petkova, Magdalena Slavcheva, and Radostina Angelova. 

These performers became vessels for transforming these real-life testimonies into a moving, immersive experience, allowing the local community to reconnect with and reimagine its past through a contemporary lens. The audience was not merely passive – they were drawn into the architecture itself, discovering the building as a living heritage site from the peak of Gabrovo’s textile era. Memories of former students, teachers, and workers came alive before their eyes – familiar and deeply resonant.

With this work, the team set out to build a collective portrait of what the Textile School once was, and to inspire new visions for its future role – as the Regional Center for Contemporary Art Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

“A Frame from the Textile” is part of Metamorphosis of Workwear – a project funded by the Creative Europe programme. It brings together six cities with rich industrial histories – Chemnitz, Gabrovo, Łódź, Manchester, Mulhouse, and Tampere – around the idea of reimagining workwear through the lens of contemporary labor, design, and local memory. Gabrovo Municipality is the official project partner, and the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Center is leading its local implementation.

Martina Novakova (Sofia, 1993) is a playwright, director, and educator whose work moves across borders – both geographic and emotional. She holds a degree in Theatre from New York University (2023), where she studied on a Fulbright and Tuk-Tam scholarship, as well as a BA in Theatre from Carlos III University in Madrid, which she completed with distinction. Among her mentors are renowned artists such as Anna Deavere Smith, André Lepecki, and Joe Salvatore.

Martina is the co-founder of Panoptikum Association, through which she develops projects in Bulgaria, Spain, France, and New York, blending documentary verbatim theatre, site-specific performance, and audio theatre. Her work is driven by themes such as memory, migration, war, and community engagement. Selected projects include the audio performance The Daughter of the Frame Maker (National Gallery Kvadrat 500), the documentary show Once You’ve Crossed the Ocean (toured in 11 cities across the US and Spain), the award-winning play A Lesson in Loneliness (First Prize, NBU, 2021), and The Wrapped Audioguide, created for the Sofia City Art Gallery. In 2020, her play Panoptikum was selected by EURODRAM and later realized with support from the National Culture Fund of Bulgaria.