For weeks now, ribbons of yellow and black, similar to police cordons, have been jumping out at Sofians and visitors to the city. The campaign was part of the advertising for the first design festival in Bulgaria, which Sofia will host on June 5-12. Similar ribbons have been decorating BTC phone booths, promoting the free hotline – 0800 10 200 – where detailed information about the exhibitions themselves is available.

Despite the economic recession, it comes to spite Bulgarians’ habit of living in an ugly, aggressive and chaotic visual environment. The attempt to question that habit emanates from Edno magazine, part of its quixotic efforts in recent years to add a breath of fresh air to Bulgaria’s culture scene.

Never mind that similar events throughout the world have the backing of city halls, the tourism industry and generous corporate donors. Or the fact that just 100km to the west and just a week earlier, such an event has been held for four years and under a similar name – Belgrade Design Week. Having witnessed the birth pangs of the Sofia Film Fest, I can vouch that it is never easy to break new ground, but that only makes success taste sweeter. And, as is ever the case with such matters, it all boils down to the

People
The festival offers 15 exhibitions, all free of charge, lectures by 17 well-known designers and five workshops.

The Next Identity Forum on June 5-7 will bring to Sofia the art director of the Louvre, Philippe Apeloig, who has left his mark on the Musee d’Orsay and the National Opera in Paris, as well as the Palais des Festivals in Cannes. The creative director of Google Creative Lab, Ji Lee, will deliver a lecture and host a workshop, presenting The Bubble Project, whose goal to "transform the intrusive and dull corporate monologues into a public dialogue" is achieved through the use of speech bubbles stickers on outdoor advertising, which passers-by are free to fill in.

Erik Kessels, one of the authors of the award-winning documentary The Other Final, which shows a football game between the world’s two lowest-ranked teams played on the same day as the 2002 World Cup Final, will share his thoughts on how any medium carries the potential for communication for a brand and its products or services.

Sofia Design Week owes the name of its first edition to another Dutchman, Henk Groenendijk, the Rietveld Academy Amsterdam professor who is the event’s consultant and together with Bulgarian Dima Stefanova make up ICECREAM, which they describe as a "label, home, studio, centre for visual communication and platform for initiatives and ideas connected to the visual and communication culture of our time".

The concept, selection and visual identity of Sofia Design Week come from three Bulgarians – Andrean Neshev, Velina Stoikova and Vassil Iliev. Neshev studied graphic design in Dusseldorf and is the author of Visual Cut Bulgaria, a book about 23 Bulgarian designers reflecting on the landscape of visual communication in Bulgaria; Stoikova studied at the Verkplaats Typografie in The Netherlands; and Iliev is a graduate of the Rietveld Academy and the art director of Edno magazine. "We want Bulgaria to become part of the global discussion about design, a discussion we cannot afford to stand on the sidelines of," Neshev says.

Faces and places
Richard Niessen’s TM City is literally built out of design – flyers stack up to become skyscrapers, posters are laid out to become parks, streets bear the names of legendary designers. The exhibition will be in the former Alliance foreign languages school building on Slaveikov Square.

Another typography exhibition is Helvetica Forever, honouring the 50-year history of graphic design’s most popular, most criticised and most admired font. Following a tour of Japan and the US, it will make a brief stop at the Sofia Art Gallery on Gourko Street.

Product and graphic design exhibitions will make up the bulk of the Sofia Design Week planned events – featuring celebrated names like Konstantin Grcic, Established&Sons and Vincenzo De Cotiis. Among the more curious exhibits are Ciboh, the Italian duo specialising in food design, at the National Art Gallery.

Other exhibitions include the Sofia Navigation System at the National Academy of Arts on Shipka Street, Politprop – a collection of old propaganda posters from the communist era, and Masters Re-mastered, gathering visual remixes of classic paintings by old Bulgarian masters at the Goethe-Institut Sofia on Budapeshta Street.

The full list of exhibitions and their locations is available at sofiadesignweek.com.

Kapital Light, issue 21