TALKING STREAMS
The Perlovska River is part of a large system of more than 30 waterways branching across the territory of the city of Sofia, with more-or-less free-flowing riverbeds, and more-or-less visible and continuous courses. Their waterlines, veining the urban landscape, remnants of the industrial era, tied to energy production, sanitation, flooding management, water supply or irrigation systems, contributed to shaping the modern structure of the city.
While its name — “the Perlovska,” or “pearl river” — seems to have preserved a hint of its former hue, it is more commonly referred to as “the canal,” like its sister river, the Vladayska River, and stretches for some thirty-one kilometers — from the foothills of Vitosha Mountain to its confluence with the Iskar River, itself a tributary of the Danube — making it a city-scale river. As an ecosystem, it runs through territories and properties and embraces their topography. Channeled in the 1920 - 1930s, it slips through the traffic while still providing an ecological corridor. Walking by the river reminds us that narratives are manifold, pointing to the infinite ways of speaking about the river, of what we project onto it, and of the multiple modes of reading and living it—always situated, always in relation.
Rivers sweep along sediments and the soil’s memory, as much as they carry possibilities to interconnect disciplines and enable situated forms of knowledge to unsettle canonical epistemologies. They are living archives, sources of history and stories; they inform about urban planning, biodiversity, heritage, water supply and wastewater management policies, but also reflect circulations, local mindsets and practices over time, giving rise to various gestures of adaptation and resistance. There is a cultural and social fabric that unravels along rivers, canals and water sources, bringing forth biographical, phantasmagorical, oneiric and futuristic tales. Urban water constitutes as much a local place for life and imagination as it is a resource with broad ecological and geopolitical stakes.
For the Nine Elephants festival, the sound walk Talking Streams seeks to highlight the network of relations, key to approaching the river. Following the course of the river, the walk begins at the foothills of Vitosha Mountain, in the Dragalevtsi neighbourhood—where the tributaries of the Perlovska River, like the Drenovitshka River, enter the urban landscape—and continues towards the city centre through Krastova Vada to arrive at South Park. Talking Streams is conceived as a collective walking and listening experience, bringing together multiple artistic perspectives through sound essays by Martin Atanasov, Marta Djourina, Kateřina Gabriel Konarovská, Maria Nalbantova, Tobias Preisig, Veronika Tabakova (Rønja), while maintaining a sensitive attentiveness to the surrounding elements.
Martin Atanasov, whose work engages with urban memory and queer histories, also through the practice of archiving, contributes a poetic reading on former public toilets along the riverbanks, as spaces of intimacy and discreet markers of the urban landscape. Marta Djourina combines analogue photography and installation while working with different light devices, water and organic elements. Here she explores the source waters of Mount Vitosha through their physical and sonic properties while also addressing their social dimension, conveyed through family habits and narratives. Kateřina Gabriel Konarovska, through her dreamlike and mythology-related practices of painting, tapestry and music, often intertwined through water bodies, offers a oneiric tale about urban rivers embedded in daily life and domestic environments. Following her work Sofia Grand Canal in 2023—a project exploring the unrealized 1950s plan by Bulgaria’s communist regime to create a navigable canal linking Sofia to the Black Sea— Maria Nalbantova now proposes a sound work that extends her research through the Perlovska River and its tributaries, tracing the territory’s history. Multidisciplinary sound artist Veronika Tabakova accompanies the walk with her electroacoustic soundscape tracking the course of the stream. Finally, composer Tobias Preisig was invited to create the overarching piece, weaving together the various contributions into a cohesive sonic walk.
The project was develop in the framework of the curatorial residency jointly organized by the CAS - Center for Advanced Studies Sofia and the Landis & Gyr Foundation.
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