site.btaSvetlana Kirova: Everyone Can Bring Beauty to Their Environment

Interviewed by BTA, Svetlana Kirova, an EU project manager who has collaborated with the Collective Foundation, said: "We all have the human desire to live in a beautiful environment that meets the challenges of global warming, which is already here. In Bulgaria, it is important to learn that we too can make decisions and that they are not just taken by someone who is far away."

This year the Collective Foundation is the Bulgarian finalist for the New European Bauhaus (NEB) Prizes, which will be given on Friday. Its Concrete to Culture initiative is competing in the Regaining a Sense of Belonging category of the NEB Champions Strand. The Bulgarian NGO won an NEB Prize in 2023 for the Danube Design Lab Ruse, developed as part of the Foundation's Rivers of the City initiative.

"NEB brings all these principles together. Our role as an NGO is to make things more concrete through projects we conceive and make visible to people so that they can decide if our temporary interventions appeal to them as long-term solutions, if they meet their needs and the needs of nature," Kirova told BTA in Brussels. She took part in a discussion on the transformation of European cities at the second edition of the NEB Festival.

Acting on the assumption that temporary interventions can become permanent, the Collective Foundation proposes initiatives with little intervention in urban spaces and sites and shows the inhabitants how their living environment and quality of life would change. Small projects are more achievable from an economic point of view because they require smaller investments, while at the same time they may prove to be effective enough to continue, said Kirova.

The Collective won an NEB prize last year with a project implemented in Ruse [on the Danube] in 2022. In 2023, the foundation organized a second edition with labs and workshops for children in Ruse and interest was so great that some of the applicants had to be turned away due to lack of space and resources. Kirova said that interest is growing and the Foundation has to provide speakers and materials - the whole logistics. "This is one of our successful projects. Every year we have to make an effort to provide resources and it would be different if these topics were part of school education, a municipal strategy. We would like to expand the scope of the project beyond Ruse this summer by increasing and expanding the materials used and the education methodology for civic education for urban development," Kirova said.

In just four years, the Collective Foundation has achieved significant success in developing its partner network. "The Collective is a very young organization and we have already started working on international projects. One is under the INTERREG Danube programme, where our role is to identify neglected places, we partner with  Gabrovo Municipality to propose places for development around the river [Yantra] in Gabrovo," Kirova said. She added that partnerships with other organizations are important for the Collective, and in Gabrovo they aim to attract private investor interest.

The development of neighbourhoods is one of the priorities of the Foundation. "The Collective has applied for funding under transnational cooperation with a project for the capital's Lyulin District - a neighbourhood remote from the cultural infrastructure, whose residents have limited access to culture. We want to offer events there that both bring them together as a community and encourage them to care together for the common spaces they inhabit. This is where the NEB comes in, which aims for actions to be local, while funding can come from international programmes," Svetlana Kirova explained. The Concrete to Culture initiative focuses on improving the environment in part of Sofia's Mladost District.

The Collective also relies on training students to build and make mock-ups with ideas for urban development, as well as on training architects and designers to draw on the experience of the Collective and invited speakers. "We want to create an active community of architects thinking about public places. I see a role for the Collective in activity related to places which are a public good, such as the air and the rivers. In one of our projects architects will transform public spaces," Kirova said. The foundation hopes to attract private investment in this activity as well.

The Foundation's philosophy and work inspire other local organizations. "The Collective already has a following in Ruse, where the river project has been inactive for  two years now, but has managed to activate a community willing to implement similar events. One of them is the Light in the Darkness festival, which also relies on a beautiful change of the environment and has an environmental focus. These communities want to get out of the box," Kirova said, adding that green ideas are finding good ground among students who, in workshops organized by the Collective, suggest transformations with a green element. "Our children are thinking along these lines and want to work towards an environment-friendly lifestyle," Kirova said.

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The NEB is an initiative launched by the European Commission to translate the European Green Deal into tangible change on the ground that improves citizens' daily lives. The New European Bauhaus was announced by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in her inaugural State of the Union address to the European Parliament in 2020. The initiative aims to link creativity and technology to create a new living environment in tune with the main principles of the green transition: sustainability - zero pollution and circularity; inclusion - ensuring access and inclusion of all members of society; aesthetics - seeking style beyond functionality, drawing inspiration from art and culture.

The New European Bauhaus Festival 2024 is taking place from April 9 to 13 at Parc du Cinquantenaire and the Arts & History Museum in Brussels.

BTA is a media partner of the event.