Vesela Stanoeva is an artist, curator and scenographer from Dortmund. She told us her favorite places in the Ruhr area and more about her upcoming projects.
Our questionnaire
Urban discovery with: Vesela Stanoeva
How would you describe yourself and your work to an alien?
Participatory. Sensual. Immersive. Surreal. Dreamlike.
What is your drive to create art?
The encounter with identity problems and their manifestations.
What do you love most about the Ruhr area in general?
What I like most is the raw development potential of the Ruhr area. It's like an unprocessed diamond in the rough - a piece of coal.
Photo: Pamela C. Scorzin
Three places in the Ruhr that you definitely show visitors:
HMKV, Academy for Theater and Digitality, and Speicher 100 in Dortmund.
What makes the art and culture scene here so special?
There are numerous free physical and virtual spaces for socio-cultural developments.
In which places do you feel the metropolis of the arts here?
The Ruhr region is not an amalgamation of individual places; it is a system driven by emergent processes. The interplay of all the elements/cities is the core of this system and thus of the Metropole of the Arts, which in turn generates new structures, characteristics and capabilities.
Where/when did you have your best cultural experience?
The last five months I was a fellow at the Academy for Theater and Digitality in Dortmund. That was just great.
Where do you like to go out to eat & drink?
In the Nordstadt district of Dortmund. There are numerous small restaurants there that represent the different cultures of Dortmund's inhabitants. At "Caracalla" they have the best hummus & tabbouleh ever!
The best parties are in...
Summer in Bulgaria. :)
If the Ruhr area was a song, this is how it would sound:
Mechanical I would guess.
What's your next project?
I just started curating a two-day conference as part of the festival "NEW NOW" at Zeche Zollverein in Essen.
