We have finally managed to harness time, focus, and team energy to synthesize a large part of the Baba Residence experience and knowledge! In this pocket book, you can discover one of the ways in which you can contribute to a decentralized future for your village, community, or neighborhood—with improved access to culture and vibrant multigenerational communities!

We have been working in Bulgarian villages for 10 years now under the umbrella of Baba Residence. These have been 10 years filled with adventures and encounters, field studies, and ethnological expeditions—everything we saw as necessary for creating a functional and ethical model that strikes a delicate balance between quality human interaction and a scale that allows for the creation of cultural products and experiences in over 30 villages. It is precisely these 10 years and everything we have learned during that time that compel us to summarize and identify the key elements of the model so that it can be used without our team necessarily being present on site. Ultimately, the goal is to see a new approach to access to culture in as many places as possible throughout the country.

Our experience over the years has covered a wide range of expertise – from working with local authorities to collaborating with over 30 community centers and local communities across the country. We have learned how to build and maintain trust and overcome conflicts and difficulties of all kinds in order to create conditions for different generations to meet and interact, and to lead the process of creating creative interventions in villages with and for local communities. After each residency program, we asked ourselves how we could adapt our model for social innovation to better serve our vision of vibrant and culturally emancipated rural areas.

We improved our work by making the Residency exclusively artistic in 2020. This meant creating new processes: issuing an open call for artists, engaging them in the theme of socially engaged and community art, finding curators who understood our vision and the goals of the program, finding a suitable place for the creative process in relation to the village, presenting and taking care of the artists’ works created in the villages, reaching a wide audience in cities such as Sofia, Vratsa, and Vidin.

In 2023, we also managed to create the first physical spaces tailored to the needs of an artist residency, together with our local friends and community centers in six villages in northwestern Bulgaria.

During these 10 years in the field, we have learned that the intersection between contemporary art and culture, traditional culture, generations, urban and rural culture is acupuncture point! Efforts in this direction unlock opportunities for regional development, the local economy, the publicity of villages, and their cultural heritage. Most importantly, it gives the host village the opportunity to write its history from today’s perspective through the methods of art, involving as many members of the community as possible in these processes. This is an infinitely valuable approach, part of the revival history of our villages, but unfortunately, it has disappeared from many of the villages where we work.

Thank you for stepping onto this path – boldly and devotedly !