TEMPORARY INTERVENTIONS
- anna32940
- Nov 4
- 4 min read
Updated: 22 hours ago
We first met Dimitar Nikolov during Imagining Cities – a symposium for situated practices within the Nine Elephants Festival, where his imaginative approach to urban space through sculpture immediately stood out.In this conversation, we talk about the dialogue between art and the city, how young people engage with public space, the value of temporary interventions, and the ways in which material and place carry memory and meaning. This interview is featured in the Urban Storytellers Journal, published within Urban Storytelling School by the Center for Social Vision (Sofia) and CSPACE* (Berlin).
What are you working on at the moment?
Dimitar: Well, I continue working by carving stone, but with a desire for more understanding and resonance, since I’ve started rock climbing and going more often to places where the stone dances and sings.
What has been your favorite project so far, and why?
Dimitar: I consider 1954 - 2024 the work closest to me, because the site of my observations is very real and personal. I associate it both with the street culture of our capital and the practice of BMX as an extreme sport, as well as with the history of current affairs - not to mention stonemasonry. The essential victory was overcoming the disc brakes toward the clash with the act of intrusion - first by inscribing the names of great authors, second by destroying them as part of a mirror act on the side of factuality.
How do you choose the places where you create your art, and what inspires you in the urban environment?
Dimitar: I don’t like clichés, yet the places impose themselves - just like in the path of a free-spirited creative character, who finds locations due to the nature and form of the urban environment, natural features, or roots that pose the question: “Who am I, and who am I now, in this period of my life?”`
In BMXer you turn sport into an artistic intervention in the city. How do you view temporary interventions as a way to meet and engage young people in public space?
Dimitar: Sport has long been part of art, I believe, because it involves young groups of people in creative expression - be it through performance or through embedding a temporary or permanent environment by inhabiting and building structures within a given setting. Temporary interventions are the most valuable in this sense, because they create an aura, energy, and soul out of feelings, thoughts, and memories manifested through encounters, conversations, and recognition in the art of the moment, or as a post-factum experience.
Your work in public spaces often brings you face-to-face with accidental audiences. What do you learn from young people’s reactions - are they open to such forms of expression in the urban environment?
Dimitar: You know, children are the most fascinating - especially when they approach with their open intensity toward discovering form, grabbing a clay sculpture, a stick, or a pebble, and responding with a free-spirited character. And the parents are even more interesting - with their oratory and directions.
What do you think art can give to young people in the city that other forms of communication can’t?
Dimitar: A path to the child within us.
In the residency “The Old School” you work with materials and architectural environments, creating a sense of connection between the traces of ancestors and the contemporary human. How do you think young people today perceive this link with the past in the spaces they inhabit - in and beyond the city?
Dimitar: We usually take for granted and as everyday the things we possess in our surroundings, and that’s why I consider temporary change a value - a way to make things visible. We often go to new and wondrous places and admire what we see, yet it’s hard to imagine difference when it’s invisible.
Your work around the Monument to the Soviet Army shows an interest in history and politics in public space. How engaged are young people with these themes, and how can art bring them closer to them?
Dimitar: Politics drives art, and art drives politics. As for how engaged young people are, I wouldn’t dare to say, since I don’t want to put people under a single label. Egypt, Greece, and Rome are the important examples in history - as a reference, one could mention the melted gold elements of the statue of Athena, which stood in the Parthenon during the Peloponnesian War. This happened due to people’s reasoning that without art there is no culture, and without culture, a state cannot exist.
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