ONE DESIGN WEEK 2016 introduces to the public in Plovdiv (both citizens and visitors), 6 designers from the Visegrad countries – Lenka Srsnova (Slovakia), Bence Pasztor and David Tarcali from Studio Nomad (Hungary), Martyna Golik (Poland), Pavla Nesverova (Czech Republic) и Klara Sumova (Czech Republic).
The festival will not only introduce the abovementioned authors (each of which has a very distinctive and specific style), but will also present them with the opportunity to exhibit and recreate their own culture, traditions, customs and identity (in the broadest sense of the word) through Bulgarian forms and methods. The project will stress the unique points of view of the authors who will question and review the notion behind local identity through, on the one hand, mutual collaboration with each other, and on the other, collaboration with the local context and the Bulgarian culture. In this manner they will continuously research / discover / lose / rediscover the strands of their own mixed Visegrad identity – equally formally homogenous and heterogeneous in its contents.
The project MIXED IDENTITIES began in April with a 4-day workshop, when the participants visited Plovdiv, Bulgaria. There the participants had an initial introduction both to one another and to the location where their collaborative work will be realized. The participants – Lenka Srsnova (Словакия), Studio Nomad (Hungary), Martyna Golik (Poland), Pavla Nesverova (Czech Republic) и Klara Sumova (Czech Republic) – will present their ideas on the cross-flow of overlapping cultural currents which bridge the four Visegrad countries. The participants will further become the authors of a collaborative narrative, which will question the notions of identity, tradition, community, nation, and etc. in order to discover new dimensions of and definitions for them – broader and more inclusive in comparison to the current ones.
Within the timeframe of the project the designers experimented with a traditional Bulgarian textile technique in collaboration with a local factory. The factory in turn developed a prototype inspired by the ideas of the participants, at the end of the said period. This will ensure the materialization of the creations resulting from the collaboration between the designers.
The produced prototypes will be presented in an exhibition as part of ONE DESIGN WEEK 2016 between the 10th and the 19th of June. Furthermore, a special presentation describing the design process will be held.
MIXED IDENTITIES is realized with the kind support of the International Visegrad Fund.