All Tracks 54 min
1 - Marta Djourina, Rivers Reversed, 2026, 11 min 25 sec
2 - Kateřina Gabriel Konarovská, Dream About the River, 3 min, 2026 and Behind the Lake Level, 3 min 56 sec, 2026, song by Maria band with Bjorn Barendse
3 - Maria Nalbantova, To Dig, To Bury, 2026, 8 min
4 - Martin Atanasov, Piazzas, 2026, 2 min 23 sec
5 - Veronika Tabakova (Rønja), Following the Course of a River - The Urban Site of Nature, 2026, 7 min 23 sec
With sound design / overarching composition by Tobias Preisig
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1. MARTA DJOURINA
• Rivers Reversed, 2026, 11 min 25 sec
Marta Djourina combines analogue photography and installation while working with different light devices, water and organic elements.
Returning to its source, she opens Talking Streams with a piece following the sound of the river back to its primary cavity, tracing the beginning of the water cycle, like a drop going back to the origins of underground waters to find its own singing. With Rivers Reversed, Marta Djourina explores the springs of Vitosha Mountain through their physical and sonic properties, while also addressing their social dimension, conveyed through family gestures, traditions, and narratives.
Marta Djourina is a Berlin-based visual artist and researcher. She studied Art History at Humboldt University and the Technical University of Berlin, and Fine Arts at UdK Berlin. Since 2024, she has been Artist in Research at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and has taught as a guest lecturer at UdK Berlin since 2020. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Berlinische Galerie, MNAHA Luxembourg, ICA Sofia, and Haus am Kleistpark. Djourina’s works are held in major public and private collections, and she has received numerous awards, including the EMOP Arendt Prize for Photography (2025), the BAZA Award (2021), the Marianne Brandt Award (2022), and the Eberhard Roters Scholarship (2020). In 2024, she published her first monograph with DISTANZ Berlin, featuring texts by Gregory Volk, Babette Werner, Miriam Jesske, and Sarah Frost.
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2. KATEŘINA GABRIEL KONAROVSKÁ
• Dream About the River, 3 min, 2026
• Behind the Lake Level, 3 min 56 sec, 2026, song by Maria band with Bjorn Barendse
Through her dreamlike and mythology-related practices of painting, tapestry and music, often intertwined through water bodies, Kateřina Gabriel Konarovská offers a oneiric tale about urban rivers embedded in daily life and domestic environments.
Kateřina Gabriel Konarovská is a Czech visual artist. From an early age, she was drawn to the intersection of creativity and spirituality. Influenced by the psychology of C. G. Jung, the symbolic writings of Annick de Souzenelle, she developed a fascination with dreams, mythology, and the invisible connections that shape human experience. Growing up in a post-communist society often skeptical of spiritual thought, she found in Jungian ideas a living source of meaning that continues to inform her artistic worldview. After earning a Bachelor’s degree in Illustration, Konarovská deepened her understanding of dream imagery. A period working as a textile designer in Düsseldorf led her to study at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, where she encountered an environment that valued intuition over hierarchy, encouraging artists to follow their inner sources rather than external approval — a principle that became central to her work. In The Hague, she co-founded the art band MARIA and developed multidisciplinary projects spanning music, performance, and visual storytelling. Her practice expanded into tapestries, murals, textiles, and community workshops. Since returning to Prague in 2024 with her family, she has continued to develop a holistic artistic language, weaving dream imagery, symbolic color, and craft traditions.
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3. MARIA NALBANTOVA
• To Dig, To Bury, 2026, 8 min
To Dig, To Bury is a sound work that follows the absurd history of the Pancharevo-Pavlovo navigable canal, a megalomaniacal attempt by the communist regime in late-1950s Bulgaria to turn landlocked Sofia into a port city. Built through the mandatory “voluntary” labour of thousands of citizens, the canal began with excavation and ended with its own burial, once it was clear that releasing water would flood the city. The Perlovska River, which threads through Sofia, was among the rivers planned to feed the never-built canal, one of the natural sources from Vitosha Mountain meant to fill it. The work is built from field recordings made in June 2026 at the two endpoints of the never-completed canal, Pancharevo and Pavlovo, its imagined beginning and end. Throughout, a voice recounts the history of the canal as if we were sailing it now, from Pavlovo towards Pancharevo, with the Perlovska running somewhere between them. The piece holds the listener in a loop of digging and burying that never resolves. The circularity mirrors the project itself: a senseless act of subjugating nature and the political decisions that continue to shape the landscape and its water bodies. (MN)
Maria Nalbantova is a visual artist working with mixed-media installations: sculpture, DIY biomaterials, found objects, video, and drawing. Her practice engages in long-term dialogue with specific places and their historical, socio-political, and ecological transformations. Nalbantova explores human and more-than-human relationships, interweaving interdisciplinary and field research, oral histories, archives, and imagination. Her work focuses on themes of coexistence, care, and responsibility, exploring how different forms of life exist together in unstable environments and what care means in shared ecosystems.Maria Nalbantova is one of the artists representing Bulgaria at the 61st Venice Biennale (2026), in the pavilion “The Federation of Minor Practices”, curated by Martina Yordanova, together with Gery Georgieva, Rayna Teneva and Veneta Androva. She has shown work at the Silk Road: Artists’ Rendezvous in China (2025, 2023), the Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara (2023), Manifesta 14 in Prishtina (2022), and viennacontemporary. Nalbantova is a winner of the BAZA Award for contemporary art (2020) and has been an artist-in-residence at Residency Unlimited in New York (2022). Her works are held in the collections of the European Parliament, the China International Culture Association, and the Sofia City Art Gallery.
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4. MARTIN ATANASOV
• Piazzas, 2026, 2 min 23 sec
Martin Atanasov, whose work engages with urban memory and queer histories through the practices of archiving, contributes to Talking Streams with the poetic reading Piazzas. Conceived as a wandering of the mind, his words lead us to former public toilets along the riverbanks.
Once functional spaces, they also became places of intimacy and pleasure frequented by the gay community, as documented in the 1980’s collected stories. Buried, now boarded up and overgrown by vegetation, they remain—however discreet and hard to identify—markers of the urban landscape, traces of the communist-era architecture, thus bearing less audible histories and voices in the public sphere.
Martin Atanasov is a visual researcher whose practice unfolds at the intersection of photography, collage, moving image, and the photobook. In his projects, Atanasov frequently engages with personal, institutional, and found archives, which he rearranges, reworks, and translates through his own aesthetic framework. In the past years his work focuses on researching the queer body and queer narratives within the social and cultural context of Bulgaria.
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5. VERONIKA TABAKOVA (RØNJA)
• Following the Course of a River - The Urban Site of Nature, 2026, 7 min 23 sec
The soundtrack explores the acoustic identity of the Perlovska River, where the fluid textures of water and wildlife merge with the layered rhythms of urban life. River currents, birds, and riparian vegetation intertwine with traffic, bridges, footsteps, and the distant resonance of the city’s infrastructure, creating a soundscape where natural and built environments continually interact.
Developed entirely from field recordings collected along the river, the composition moves beyond documentary representation. Through time-stretching, granular synthesis, spectral and resonant filtering, modulation, and dynamic spatialization, the original recordings are transformed into a continuous sonic environment while preserving traces of their acoustic origins. The resulting textures range from recognizable environmental sounds to abstract musical forms, gradually blurring the boundaries between natural and urban acoustics. (VT)
Veronika Tabakova is a Bulgarian multidisciplinary sound artist whose main goal is to explore as much of the world of sound and music as possible. She has experience as a pianist, sound engineer, sound designer, producer, and composer. Veronika has been working on different projects exploring digital media and its influence on sound and music. In 2018, she directed and produced her first interactive work - sound theatre “Forest Labyrinth”. She is a co-founder of the creative team “DigiPhysics” with which she’s been working on many interactive audiovisual projects over the last 5 years. Along with that, Veronika has been composing music and sound design for different performances in the field of dance, circus, and audio-visual arts, as well as several museums’ exhibitions in different cities in Bulgaria.
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TOBIAS PREISIG
• Talking Streams, sound design / overarching composition, 2026
Composer Tobias Preisig was invited to create the overarching piece, weaving together the various contributions into a cohesive sonic walk. The soundscape is about finding recurring themes and the specific textures of each voice, building an audible weaving of relations between the individual sound works.
Tobias Preisig is a violinist and film composer from Zurich. His music explores the intersections of experimental, classical, and electronic music. He performs solo concerts and tours with the electronica duo Egopusher across Europe and Asia, including performances at festivals such as Montreux Jazz, Tauron Katowice, London Jazz, and Tokyo Jazz. He also performs with Levitation, a duo with Stefan Rusconi on church organ, which explores the richness of drones and atmospheric noise. He has collaborated with Colin Stetson on *Sorrow*, The Cinematic Orchestra, FAUST, Youn Sun Nah, and Jan Bang, and composes music for film and theater. In 2012, he received the “Werkjahr” cultural award from the City of Zurich and was part of the “Priority Jazz” program of Pro Helvetia. In 2018, he was honored with the “Recognition Award” by the Canton of Zurich’s cultural department and he got nominated for the “German Documentary Film Music Award 2026” at DOK.fest München. In 2024, he earned his Master’s degree in Composition with a focus on Sound Design at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).