RadLab Studio and the largest festival for analog and experimental photography in Bulgaria

For the second year in a row, RadLab Studio is hosting an event dedicated to analog and experimental photography. De Vita Solitaria / On the Solitary Life is an independent festival – though the word hardly captures its essence – a three-day gathering of artists, enthusiasts, collectors, and researchers of photographic processes who are connected to, or in search of, a relationship with analog photography.

The theme of the 2025 edition is “Solitude” – not as alienation, but as a space for observation, inner dialogue, and conscious encounters with oneself. The festival explores solitude as a potential for creative imagination, while also building a bridge back to the time before social networks, when every image was an act of discovery – found through effort, patience, and silence.

The program of De Vita Solitaria unfolds through six workshops, three exhibitions, four discussions, interventions in public space, and challenges to our own understanding of photography. Events move between the darkroom and the street, between the intimate and the noisy. The atmosphere is participatory and encourages dialogue, combining personal experiences with the collective energy of sharing.

The events will take place at two locations in Gabrovo:

• RadLab Studio (9Zh Shipka St.)
• RadLab Residency @ Christo & Jeanne-Claude Center (72 Bryanska St. – former Textile High School)

Participation is free of charge. You don’t need to own a Mamiya RB67 or to have read Camera Lucida in French – all that’s required is to register in advance, so that materials and logistics can be prepared.

De Vita Solitaria – RadLab Community Gathering 2025 will be held from 20 to 22 September 2025 in Gabrovo. Full details of the program can be found here.

About RadLab Studio

RadLab Studio is a space for analog and alternative photography where like-minded people can learn, experiment, and inspire one another. The team believes that analog photography and noble photographic processes should be accessible to everyone. Its mission is to foster inclusion by providing open access to the studio, conducting research, and preserving and sharing both knowledge and practical skills.

RadLab believes the most meaningful processes happen together – and invites anyone who shares this vision to become part of its community.

Childhood Years: Christo and Jeanne-Claude Center presents an exhibition at the Bulgarian Cultural Institute in Paris

On September 19, the exhibition “Childhood Years” by the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Center for Contemporary Art – Gabrovo will open at the gallery of the Bulgarian Cultural Institute in Paris. The occasion is twofold – 90 years since the birth of Christo Javacheff and 30 years since the emblematic Pont Neuf project, which left a lasting mark on the artistic history of Paris.

Childhood Years explores childhood as the first stage of imagination – a time when play and freedom outline the contours of future creative thought. The exhibition brings together rare photographs and documentary materials from Christo’s early years in Bulgaria with works by a new generation of contemporary artists currently working at the Center in Gabrovo. In this way, the exhibition creates a bridge between Christo’s personal history and the collective energy of young artists, between the memory of beginnings and the vision for the future.

Seven of them – Anton Ivanov, Gergana Lazarova-Runkel, Ivelin Penchev, Konstantin Zlatev, Nevena Ekimova, Pavel Tsarov, and Radoil Serafimov – will present their works in the French capital for the first time.

A special section is dedicated to Christo’s childhood – his family, schools and factories, favorite games, and first steps in art. These early experiences would later crystallize into the iconic elements of his work with Jeanne-Claude – fabrics, ropes, barrels.

Opened in 2023, the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Center is located in the building of the former Textile High School in Gabrovo. It functions as an artist residency and space for contemporary art, inspired by the legacy of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Though still in development, the Center already attracts young creators from different countries and is steadily establishing itself as a place for experimentation, dialogue, and new artistic horizons.

The exhibition “Childhood Years” is organized by the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Center – Gabrovo and the Bulgarian Cultural Institute in Paris, with the support of the Museum of Humor and Satire, the Municipality of Gabrovo, and the America for Bulgaria Foundation.

Radoil Serafimov: drawing has never been a decision so much as an extension of self.

For Radoil Serafimov, drawing has never been a decision so much as an extension of self. From early childhood, it existed as a natural motion – quiet, constant, and unquestioned. There was never a dramatic pivot toward art, no sudden realization. It was always there, simply unfolding along with him.

He studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Veliko Tarnovo, and after graduating, returned to his hometown of Gabrovo. The first couple of years back were marked by uncertainty: a stretch of time defined more by absence than direction. No income, no formal work, no studio. To sustain himself, he began creating paintings with commercial potential. Even in that space, he remained attentive to the integrity of the image, steering away from decorative clichés or cheap sentiment, committed instead to maintaining a sense of internal coherence and aesthetic seriousness.

Eventually, with support from his family, he secured a small attic space that became his first proper studio. In just a few months, he produced around twenty new paintings and began submitting them to competitions and open calls – many of which, at the time, still offered significant opportunities for young artists. Most led to silence. His early efforts were regularly overlooked, especially in the more centralized and saturated circles in Sofia.

But in 2014, something shifted. Though his application for the BAZA Award wasn’t selected, one of its jurors, curator Maria Vassileva, noticed his portfolio. Through the Stoyan Kambarev Foundation, she was then initiating a new award specifically for young painters. Serafimov received the 2014 prize, and with it came an opening – more invitations, more visibility, more recognition. What followed wasn’t a breakthrough in the cinematic sense, but rather a slow, steady unfolding of possibility.

For the next nine years, Serafimov balanced his painting practice with full-time work as a scenography technician in the local Gabrovo theater. It offered financial stability, but more importantly, it allowed him to maintain a consistent presence in the studio. Every free moment, before rehearsals, between productions, after hours, he returned to his canvases.

Over time, his work has evolved in form, palette, and tone, but its core has remained anchored in a particular way of looking: careful, considered, open to ambiguity. Some images are born from direct observation, others from fleeting impressions or visual memory. The subject matter ranges widely – figures, landscapes, fragments of architecture, imagined spaces – but what holds it together is a persistent desire to touch on something beyond the visible.

He rarely begins with a defined message or conceptual frame. Sometimes a painting arrives with urgency, completed in a day, responding to a specific sensation or internal spark. Other times, the process unfolds more slowly in days of looking, doubting, reworking. His more recent practice favors this latter rhythm, marked by intervals of reflection, hesitation, and quiet resistance. What compels him most are forms that resist simple interpretation – shapes or images that contain multiple readings, that suggest rather than state. The symbolic emerges not through theory, but through texture and tone. “I’m drawn to the spaces in an object where something else is hiding,” he says. “Something layered, something not immediately legible.”

When Serafimov was offered a studio at the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Center in Gabrovo, his response was cautious. He had grown attached to his previous workspace, and relocating meant disrupting a familiar rhythm. It took months before he fully moved in – months in which the studio existed more as a potential than a place of work. Eventually, that shifted. The space settled around him. He began painting there consistently, finding his own pace within the new architecture. Today, he describes his studio at the Center as a functional, focused environment, less romantic than grounded, less about inspiration than about permission.

The building itself, once a textile school and now in transformation, holds a certain ambient charge. While Serafimov doesn’t directly use found objects or industrial remnants in his work, he responds to their quiet presence. To him, they are not resources to be repurposed but witnesses to time: objects that carry history without needing to explain it.

Though his practice is deeply individual, Serafimov recognizes the subtle value of proximity to others. The artists at the Center each work in distinct mediums, with different temperaments and trajectories, but over time, an organic form of community has begun to take shape – not one based on collaboration, but on presence, on shared effort, on parallel lives unfolding under the same roof. It is not a collective in the conventional sense. There are no joint projects or formal frameworks for exchange. But the slow accumulation of conversations, the gentle weaving of familiarity, has created a quiet current between the studios, one that Serafimov finds grounding, even if he remains mostly inward in his focus.

When asked about the connection between his practice and the Center’s namesakes, Serafimov is reflective but firm. He admires the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, their dedication, the magnitude of their vision, their insistence on impermanence. He sees value in the ephemerality they pursued, in the idea that an artwork can be both monumental and momentary. But his own work speaks in another register. It unfolds slowly, endures materially, resists spectacle. He does not seek to mirror their legacy, nor does he feel obliged to. What resonates is their conviction – their unyielding commitment to making, regardless of reception or reward.

In a cultural moment where painting is often asked to justify itself, where trends favor interdisciplinarity, political urgency, or social engagement, Serafimov continues to trust the quiet labor of the image. He is not indifferent to the world, but believes that complexity can live within the frame, within the act of looking, within the relationship between pigment and surface. Not every day in the studio results in a painting. Some are filled with silence, with music playing softly in the background, with notes, books, sketches, and pauses. Others begin with no plan at all: a brushstroke, a line, a movement that slowly unfolds into something more.

There is no fixed concept or unifying thesis behind his work. He avoids declarations. His approach is intuitive, exploratory, porous. If there is a theme, it lies in the attention he gives to things – his commitment to seeing, to lingering, to allowing meaning to arrive without force. As for the future of his place in the Center, he remains open. If the atmosphere shifts too far from the conditions that allow his practice to thrive, if the rhythms change, if the demands overtake the quiet, he may choose to move on. For now, though, he is here. And in this moment, that is enough.

For an intertwined artistic community: hosting Ivelina Ivanova (BrumBur)

The Christo and Jeanne-Claude Center, following the artistic duo’s inspiring legacy of creation through vast public engagement, aims to build an intertwined artistic community to foster within it’s premises, turning this primarily tribute space into a dynamic, living platform for contemporary art production. The center currently hosts 7 artists, each connected by heart or practice with the values and work ethic of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, exploring creative possibilities and the resources of the former Textile Technical School of Gabrovo.

Ivelina Ivanova ’s path into the world of embroidery is anything but conventional, though it is deeply rooted in the craftsmanship of her family. Describing herself as a “craftswoman,” she brings an individual approach to the craft, blending tradition with contemporary aesthetics. Her journey began long before her formal training at the Textile Technical School, which she completed in 2001. Growing up in a household where her parents ran a small embroidery business, Iva was immersed in the depths of her craft from an early age. Her mother, a trained embroiderer, guided her through the art of handcrafting with a sewing machine, an essential tool she still uses today. “I am self-taught in many ways,” Iva reflects, yet her work is always intentional, deeply personal, and rich in history.

The transformation from a family-run business to Iva’s solo enterprise was not without challenges. After the sudden loss of her father during her university years, Iva and her mother faced financial and administrative struggles that ultimately led to the closure of their family business. However, the seeds of creativity were already planted. After raising her two children, Iva’s desire to return to her roots in embroidery grew stronger. In 2017, she registered as a freelance designer, and her creative practice began to take shape.

Iva’s work today is a reflection of her dual commitment to preserving traditional techniques while questioning the consumption-driven demands of modern fashion. Her embroidery is deeply connected to the idea of reusing and recycling materials, contributing to a slower, more mindful approach to creation. She explains, “Every material I work with—be it fabric or denim—is an opportunity to give something old a new life.” Her platform, which she refers to as “BrumBur” (a name inspired by the sound of the sewing machine and sometimes the one in her head), is a space where discarded materials are transformed into heartfelt, handcrafted products, including accessories, personalised items, clothes and bags.

Iva’s journey is a testament to the power of art in reinterpreting the past while creating something timeless. Through her work, she continues to honor the legacy of craft while embracing the possibilities of contemporary practice. At her atelier in the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Center, she finds not only a space for creative experimentation but also a community that supports and encourages the evolution of her work. As Iva looks toward the future, she sees her practice continuing to evolve, with a commitment to producing work that speaks to the importance of sustainability and the preservation of craft in an increasingly disposable world.

Through embroidery, Iva reimagines the possibilities of forgotten textiles, turning them into objects that are both beautiful and meaningful—offering new life to materials that might otherwise be discarded. Her story is a reminder that art is not just about creating for the sake of creation, but about transforming what already exists into something new and full of purpose.