Book Launch: "To touch at the edge"

Panel Discussion + Presentation * by

Change Bureau - Creative Direction + Graphic Design

Vasil Vladimirov - Project Management + 1/3 Project Management

*The Discussion and the presentation will be conducted in Bulgarian.

Nevertheless, the book itself is in English.

Two years ago Vasil Vladimirov (KOOP), Krasimira Buteva, Martin Atanasov and Maya Hristova (EEP Berlin) initiate a program for building connections between researchers and/or artist-photographers that work on themes related to the imprint of the surroundings upon the individual in moments of turbulence. By environment is meant their homeland: one of the 5 countries with whom Bulgaria shares a physical border, and by turbulence: more often than not ones caused by political regime.

The motivation behind the project: to seek out unexpected intersections between their personal experiences, and to retell and relive the distinctiv ones through the lens of their personal stories.

6 participants, from all 6 countries, within 6 online encounters shared with each other their views, traumas, and sources of happiness, and how often the borders of these polarities in perception are easily crossable and thus migrate from one to another.

Program Outcomes

(Physical ones)

1.  A photographic exhibition, that ws on view at the end of 2022 @Koop, in which each of participants created a new project or revised one that had already taken place, interpreting it in the light of what was shared throughout the meetings.

2. A book to contain their "confessions" that take the format of artistic works, academic papers or their shared conversations.

The book "To Touch at the edge" takes a direction on its own so that it can respond as objectively as possible to its content: to the extent that conveying emotionality can be objectively presented from a third instance. Change Bureau chooses a rather cold and sterile formatting in order to place the book as a counterpoint to the content, one to be in the mise en scene of the authors' experience, but simultaneusly to convey that what lays beyond the individuality of the participants, they are mere "subjects that are part of a collective trauma.

The book itself is a collection of life journeys, while at the same time a journey on its own.

Come and meet the guides, i.e. its creators and initiators of the book, that can give the future reader the initial impetus on how to handle and navigate through it.