THE LACK OF SHARED SPACE AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM
- anna32940
- Nov 13
- 9 min read
During the summer residency of the Urban Storytelling School, we talked with Vladiya Mihaylova from Toplocentrala – chief curator for visual arts at the new art center in Sofia that provides a platform for independent art, performance, and community engagement. The conversation is part of the Urban Storytellers Journal and touches on urban change, democratic processes, young people, and the relationship between art, community, and public life.
Vladiya: For years, I worked at the municipal Sofia City Art Gallery, and then took the position of the head of the Visual Arts Department here. Toplocentrala was founded mainly through the joint efforts of the independent scene for performing arts, contemporary dance and theater, which lacked proper infrastructure in Sofia. We see Toplocentrala as a continuation and “revival” of part of the National Palace of Culture — because the building of the Center is constructed on the foundations of the old thermal power plant of the National Palace of Culture — but as a new type of institution which acts more horizontally, more in the network, which engages different communities, not only artistic.
I’ve worked on several projects dealing directly with public space. One was in Plovdiv, where the artist Kirill Kuzmanov built a mirror wall across a small street. Another project in Sofia was with Czech artist Katarzyna Šeda, known for her long-term community work aimed at real neighborhood change. She created a city game in the overbuilt district of Manastirski Livadi - West, where the infrastructure is chaotic and the cars dominate the traffic, due to massive overdevelopment, something we often see in Sofia.
The lack of shared space is not only an urban, but also a social problem - it cuts connections between groups in Sofia, leaving few places for spontaneous communal life. Cities become more and more fragmented, and people more and more disengaged. So the real communal work should be a very complex one, beyond temporary events; it requires creating sustainable spaces where people can gather, stay, and form communities on their own terms.
What about the broader socio-political context art operates within?
Vladiya: I think artists are mediators in public space, as they don’t come from specific interests. When you make a drawing, you do not necessarily engage, but you expand your imagination around how and what you can see. In this way, artists play an important role as mediators and facilitators. They act as provokers — not only of communities, but also of thought, attention, and attitude — stimulating processes that unfold in the public space. Through their work, artists expand mental horizons and initiate transformations that can be urban, architectural, conceptual, or even political.
When democracy “came” to Bulgaria — a phrase commonly used in the country — it did not merely signify a political change, but the arrival of an idea associated with the imagined world beyond the Iron Curtain. However imagination is one thing, and the practice of democracy is another. In Bulgaria, democratic culture had little ground to build upon — there were no deeply rooted traditions of civic participation or institutional transparency, and the ideals that “arrived” often clashed with the realities of post-socialist transition.
For years, Bulgarians were asked: “Do you feel European?” Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007, yet people still asked me this. I would say: “What do you mean? We are in Europe, so I am European, no?”
In the early years, democracy often appeared as a kind of performance — a spectacle resembling a magician’s show, in which everything seemed suddenly and magically possible, yet the illusion faded when confronted with everyday realities and institutional inertia. And within years, the real performative process was completely different from the very democratic ideas. I'm speaking now as a cultural theoretician. In the early 1990s, there was massive privatization — everything communal was dismantled and returned to individuals, but in a chaotic, power-driven way. This created deep social imbalances: the very rich, the very poor, winners and losers. In the 1990s, there was also excessive individualism. Everyone wanted to express themselves freely, but that isn’t real democracy. This excessive sense of individual freedom often came at the cost of boundaries — a space where personal ambition and desire for growth overshadowed collective responsibility and eroded many of the values that once held people together.
Bulgarian society still operates as a Balkan (Oriental) one that has public space crossed with networks, and I'm talking about money networks, business networks, business related to a political life that occupy the shadow of the public space.
In recent years, we have seen small, independent spaces that somehow survive within this network of interests and manage to exist between these interests. But it's just the start of the real democratic process that we should develop from now on.
How do today’s global conditions—where wars erupt in some regions while peace feels petrified elsewhere—reflect on our ability to navigate and adapt?
Vladiya: Globally, I think we’re witnessing the manifestation of the darker side of modernity. Neither Putin, nor Trump, nor Netanyahu came from nowhere. These figures emerged from long historical processes shaped by human decisions and particular value systems grounded in excess: the cult of the individual, domination over nature, grand national or spatial ambitions, and the concentration of capital.
In the early 20th century, modernity was tied to ideas and collective visions of progress; today, it is tied to the personal ambitions of those who have accumulated capital and symbolic power to act. This concentration of wealth has brought with it the concentration of power, the erosion of the middle class, the deepening fragmentation of societies and the disappearance of public space and institutions. What once appeared as the promise of personal freedom has transformed into a system of privilege, where the boundaries between ambition and exploitation are blurred.
What we are witnessing now is an excessive pathology — personal in some cases, systemic in others — and a pervasive narcissism that has become the defining illness of our time. This narcissism legitimises the right to be ruthless, to put oneself first, to confuse self-expression with self-interest. It is an extreme distortion of the concept of personal well-being, which no longer depends on mutuality or solidarity but on visibility, accumulation, and domination. Trump is visible only because he has the platform, yet the mindset he embodies is widely shared.
I do believe we are living through a time of profound change, though its direction remains uncertain. On one hand, there are people who recognise these problems and try to act, even if their power is limited. On the other hand, there is excessive, self-referential power without long-term vision — and that is what fundamentally distinguishes our present from the beginning of modernity.
Viktoria: Let’s go back to the topic of young people, a topic at the core of the Urban Storytelling School – how do you feel about young people today, and what do you think their real options and actions are?
Vladiya: I have no clear idea, but it’s definitely very different. Our generation grew up with a strong sense of the future — now that idea feels blurred. But this uncertainty also gives young people a higher threshold than we had at their age. They seem more mature in a way, with a stronger sense of responsibility. They probably understand better than older generations that extreme individualism doesn’t work. I think they’re pushed to think about this because they need to imagine a possible future.
Eleonora: For our project Recipes for Future, we did workshops in several schools and also conducted surveys at tram stops. Of course, we found a big mix of perspectives, but what really surprised me was that many of the young people we spoke with weren’t as anxious or worried about the future as we expected. That was a big surprise for me — a lot of them actually have curiosity about the future.
Curiosity as an emotion came up a lot, along with a sense of excitement. What I found interesting was the mix between individual and collective visions of the future. Many talked about wanting to realise themselves professionally, and they felt capable and confident about that. And a lot of students also wanted more collective values: care, understanding, and cooperation.
Vladiya: For me, as a mother, this raises big questions about what our children have to learn. What is a “good skill”? My generation valued discipline and knowledge. I imagine that it's better for me to keep the curiosity of my children, so they can know that they must seek new knowledge and be curious all the time. I'm really not sure that some of the professions will exist in the near future. There’s a clear tendency that now we go back to nature and make things with our hands again, with gardening or making bread.
Guglielmo: In our project Finding Home, we interviewed people from different backgrounds who had moved to Berlin. We wanted to understand how and when people start to feel at home in a new place. In Berlin, many refugees came because of the wars. Is this also something you see in Sofia? There’s a lot of pressure on the city here too — it feels quite similar to what’s happening in Berlin.
Vladiya: Is it also a topic in Sofia, this migration crisis all around, and is it also felt in the texture of the city, and in the reaction of the society. But, it depends, it's not an equal thing. I mean, Bulgarians open their homes and their hearts for Ukrainian people, but if we speak about migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, it's not the same. And in this, Bulgaria is a very conservative country, it's not hospitable at all. We do have a lot of examples of the Bulgarian state refusing to give citizenship or permanent residency to people who are political migrants and could be killed.
And I do believe that Germany and France are much more open than Bulgaria towards migrants. Though historically, towns like Plovdiv are all migration towns. We have Armenians, Jews, Turkish people living there, and they live without this migrant identity crisis that we have, because it was natural to move from place to place. Now, we do have an identity crisis related to migration; we have a lot of fear, fueled and exaggerated by right-wing people, and it's part of the whole contemporary situation, which is also produced by these identity policies.
Maria: The last person we interviewed yesterday, Maggie, 18 years old, said she really hates how fragmented society is and how people are divided by labels. From my own experience, especially now that Ksenia and I are finishing our master’s in Berlin, which focuses on postcolonial thinking and challenging oppressive systems in art institutions, I’ve realised how important it is to name differences — to acknowledge that being white or Black, for example, is not the same experience. But it’s equally important to move beyond those labels. There’s intersectionality, and there’s also individuality; it’s crucial to see how we connect as human beings beyond those differences.
Switching the topic a bit — how do you see the connection with the community, and how can an art space become more independent from state funding? This has become an important issue in the art world, especially when the state grows more authoritarian.
Vladiya: Bulgaria was never anywhere near Germany in terms of public arts funding, so we don’t feel the cuts as harshly, simply because we never had that level of support. But yes, we feel it. Especially this year, the Ministry of Culture includes a very populist party that has no real understanding of art or why it matters, so they see no reason to fund it. We’re facing serious difficulties; institutions like Toplocentrala are struggling.
The idea of public money and public investment in arts is related to education, it's related to the development of visual or performing or whatever artistic language, outside of the market dependency, and it's related to the social access to art. When we speak about the departure of the state in public funding, we speak about changing the art field as well, because, sadly or not, big projects, like operas, big theatres, are not possible to exist without state funding. The state is not a corporation; it's a tool, it's a channel of money for the people. Without state funding, a lot of art spaces will be closed, and this is a reality because they cannot exist without public money.
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