Exhibition: “Linear Encounters: Bulgarian Traces in Abu Dhabi’s Modern Architectural Heritage”

The Christo and Jeanne-Claude Centre, Gabrovo is delighted to invite you on 26 September to an exhibition that unfolds a little-known yet significant story – the role of Bulgarian architects and engineers in shaping the modern face of the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

“Linear Encounters: Bulgarian Traces in Abu Dhabi’s Modern Architectural Heritage” brings together archival documents, photography, audiovisual installations, and films to reveal how European modernist ideas intertwined with Arab cultural identity and the specific climate of the region.

Hosted at the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Centre, the exhibition enters into a natural dialogue with the legacy of the artist duo who fearlessly transformed the world into their canvas. The former Textile Technical School, today alive as a home of experiment and creative energy, amplifies the sense of fragile balance between heritage and contemporaneity, between the local and the global.

Linear Encounters is not only a journey into Abu Dhabi’s architectural memory but also an invitation to reflect on our own cities — their layers, vulnerabilities, and possible futures. Through discussion panels, workshops, and conversations with architects and heirs of this story, the exhibition transforms memory into a shared field of imagination.

🌃 PROGRAMME:

🗣️ Discussion panels (3rd floor, before the opening)

17:00–17:50 | Panel 1: Preserving Modern Architectural Heritage

18:00–18:50 | Panel 2: Contemporary Models for Displaying Modern Architectural Heritage

🥂 Official opening: 19:00

PANOPTIKUM or the Memory of Objects: a performance by director Martina Novakova

⚡ In partnership with Racho Stoyanov Drama Theatre

🎫 Tickets: at the box office of Racho Stoyanov Drama Theatre or online here

On September 23 at 18:00, the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Center in Gabrovo invites you on a theatrical journey through the house of L. and the stories of unusual objects that preserve her memories, with the original performance PANOPTIKUM* by Martina Novakova.

Behind every corner of this house-museum lurks something unexpected: conflicting voices from the past; the gaze of a painted all-seeing eye; a silent telephone bought at a flea market in Madrid; a half-forgotten melody; the workers of a house-clearing company.

Memory becomes a dangerous territory, where the fate of objects depends on the attention of the audience. Each viewer must choose their own place within the space and the story they wish to follow. The experience combines several disciplines: verbatim theatre, original live music, and installation art. A central source of inspiration for the performance is the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

PANOPTIKUM is a story about the fear of losing memory, about the material world and the objects we choose to surround ourselves with, the value we attribute to them, and their influence on our relationships.

* panoptikum (noun, singular) — a museum where rare and valuable objects or wax figures are displayed.

❕ Duration: 80 minutes, during which the audience moves freely through the space. Please inform the organizers in advance if you require a seated place.

PANOPTIKUM is an original performance by Martina Novakova, adapted to various spaces – houses, museums, underground sites – and constantly evolving. It was created within the Master’s program in Theatre Arts at Carlos III University of Madrid, under the direction of Juan Mayorga. The premiere took place in June 2018 at Auditorio de Leganés in Madrid. In 2020, it was selected by EURODRAM Bulgaria and presented within the “ProText 10” festival at Goethe-Institut, Sofia. Its Bulgarian premiere was realized with the financial support of the National Culture Fund, Debuts program (2021), and took place in February 2024 at RCAC Toplocentrala.

The event in Gabrovo is carried out with the financial support of the National Culture Fund, Distribution program 2024, and in partnership with the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Center – Gabrovo and Racho Stoyanov Drama Theatre – Gabrovo.

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.

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.

Contemporary Design Inspired by Gabrovo’s Industrial Heritage

From April 23 to 27, 2025, the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Center in Gabrovo hosted a creative residency with fashion designers Mariela Gemisheva and Nikolay Bozhilov, textile artist Nevena Ekimova, and curator Wiete Sommer (Germany). Titled Metamorphosis of Workwear, the project aims to rethink the design of workwear for the professions of today and tomorrow, inspired by the industrial legacy of six European cities: Chemnitz, Łódź, Manchester, Mulhouse, Tampere, and Gabrovo.

Nikolay Bozhilov, Mariela Gemisheva, Wiete Zommer (curator of the project) and Nevena Ekimova in workwear, at the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Centre. Photographer Ilina Peneva.

Over the course of five intensive days, the participants immersed themselves in the local context – from visits to active factories to walks across the city and encounters with its industrial memory. The residency began with a tour of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Center – a building that once housed Gabrovo’s Textile School and now offers space for creative freedom and contemporary art. The city itself – historically known as the “Manchester of Bulgaria” – provided a rich backdrop for exploration.

The day continued with a visit to the Interactive Museum of Industry and a walk through the city in search of traces left by once-thriving textile giants – including the former Kartalov factory, now a second-hand clothing store, and the still-operating “Krushata” factory.

On April 24, the residents visited “Mak” – one of the last remaining textile factories still operating in the region. Their meeting with the factory’s owner, Mr. Bizhev, who personally guided them through the space, was a significant and emotional moment in their research journey. We are deeply grateful to him for his generosity and time.

On the final day of the residency, the artists presented their initial ideas for contemporary workwear designs inspired by the spirit of the past. Their concepts revealed each participant’s unique approach – from workwear designed for angels and visions for the future rooted in durable, sustainable materials, to an algorithm for designing garments for an army of artists. All drew deep inspiration from Gabrovo’s rich textile legacy and the energy of the spaces they explored.

Mariela Gemisheva presents a workwear design project she will be working on in the coming month. Photographer Ilina Peneva.

Nikolay Bozhilov presents a workwear design project she will be working on in the coming month. Photographer Ilina Peneva.

Nevena Ekimova presents a workwear design project she will be working on in the coming month. Photographer Ilina Peneva.

The Metamorphosis of Workwear project continues! Follow our website and social media for updates on the artists’ work-in-progress, the upcoming exhibition in Chemnitz (Germany) in September 2025, and the final fashion presentation, which will take place in Gabrovo in May 2026.

Metamorphosis of Workwear: Chemnitz, Łódź, Gabrovo, Manchester, Tampere unite to Explore Europe’s Industrial Heritage

Metamorphosis of Workwear is an international project that brings together six European cities with rich industrial legacies – Chemnitz, Gabrovo, Łódź, Manchester, Mulhouse, and Tampere. Funded by the Creative Europe program, the project seeks to explore, reinterpret, and present the industrial past through art, culture, and community dialogue.

Between January and June 2025, three residencies in Chemnitz, Łódź, and Gabrovo will bring together three artists from each city to create designer pieces inspired by local industrial heritage and culture. Through visits to operating or abandoned factories, conversations with workers, experts, and residents, the artists will explore the evolution of the textile industry in these cities, weaving their discoveries into artistic expressions.

As a project partner, the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Center plays a pivotal role in actively engaging the local community, collecting and preserving stories from Gabrovo’s industrial heritage, and inspiring new artistic interpretations. In collaboration with the Interactive Museum of Industry in Gabrovo, the center will spotlight the city’s history, industrial development, and the sustainability of its processes, solidifying Gabrovo’s reputation as the “Manchester of Bulgaria.”

The Textile Technical School, the building housing the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Center, has been a cornerstone of Gabrovo’s textile production history, serving for decades as a generator of skilled professionals for the city’s factories. Within the project framework, we will trace the school’s history through personal stories shared by its students, teachers, neighbors, and enthusiasts to create an archive preserving these memories for future generations.

In late April, in a residency program we will welcome three artists who, over the course of a week, will work with the collected archive, expand it through new meetings and visits to the city’s still-operating textile factories, and intertwine these threads with their own creative interpretations to design contemporary workwear. The names of the participating artists will be announced soon—follow our social media channels for updates!