22 July 2023, 10-13h
Workshop by Andrea Popyordanova and Francesca Castagnetti, part of the exhibtition “New Ecologies” at Swimming Pool (2023).
Read the conversation with Francesca and Andrea here.
Find out more about the publication useless guide to vartopo and its weeds here.
Francesca Castagnetti, an ethnobotanist from Italy, and artist Andrea Popjordanova invite you to join them for an exploratory walk through Vartopo, during which participants will be encouraged to get to know the urban landscape through plants and their stories. Vartopo is a meadow on the outskirts of Sofia – neither a park nor a developed area. The walk will last around two hours and will include sharing of knowledge and practices that will help us immerse ourselves in this place with all our senses. We will become familiar with some of the weeds and grasses in Vartopo and explore what plants can teach us about ourselves, the land, and this specific site. During the walk, we will also touch on theories and ideas from contemporary ecology and ethnobotany, and discuss our relationship with the land and its plants. At the end of the workshop, we’ll use an accessible creative technique to take a piece of the landscape home with us.
Vartopo is a vast meadow with a view of Vitosha Mountain, located between the Sofia neighborhoods of Darvenitsa, Mladost, and Student Town. According to Sofia’s General Urban Plan, Vartopo is designated as a zone for city parks and gardens, meaning that private developments are not permitted on its territory. However, a large portion of the land consists of private plots that currently cannot be acquired, and as a result, Vartopo cannot be transformed into a public park either. Construction sites are spreading along its edges, making it increasingly difficult to find an entrance. Where the buildings stop, the meadow begins — a habitat for many fruit trees, wild plants, stray dogs, illegal structures, two rivers, a monastery, and more. Unlike a city park with carefully selected and classically beautiful plant species and paved paths, Vartopo is what it chooses to be in different seasons. This meadow on the edge of Sofia is, in its own way, a fragment of what the Sofia plain once was, before becoming densely populated and heavily built up.
The project is supported by the Ministry of Culture through the “Visual Arts” program, as well as by Culture Moves Europe.
Francesca Castagnetti is an ethnobotanist affiliated with the Centre for Biocultural Diversity in Kent and an apprentice in traditional herbalism. Her work spans ethnobotany, herbalism, and culture. She moves with the seasons between Italy, the United Kingdom, Nepal, and the Norwegian Arctic — from lighthouses to mountain villages. Francesca studies and teaches about plants and land-based knowledge using ethnographic methods, while also drawing on theories from ethnobiology, political ecology, and Indigenous studies. Through her knowledge of herbalism and hands-on work with people, she explores community dynamics, storytelling, and ritual as ways to build deep relationships with the land we inhabit.
Andrea Popjordanova is an artist whose creative practice lies at the intersection of illustration, books, and graphic design. She is interested in how people live, how they shape and influence the spaces they inhabit, and how they connect to them. In 2021, she completed the project First Line, an imaginary guidebook to the coastline of Sunny Beach and its overdevelopment — a story told through drawings of swimming pools and promotional hotel texts. In 2022, she was a participant in the first edition of the Center for Social Vision, where she began working on the topic of unfamiliar and wild green spaces in Sofia and people’s relationship to them through the projects Orchards and Urban Harvest.
