CONCEPT
This seven-day summer school in visual anthropology takes Pernik, Bulgaria, as a field site for thinking through the afterlives and possible futures of late industrial towns in Southeastern Europe. Historically shaped by mining, socialist industrialisation, post-socialist restructuring, and renewed forms of infrastructural and speculative investment, Pernik offers a dense landscape in which labour memory, material decay, collective attachment, and competing visions of renewal coexist. Through ethnographic film, photography, sound, walking methods, and collaborative field-based experimentation, participants will explore how industrial transformation is registered in landscapes, bodies, everyday routines, visual traces, and local narratives of change. The school approaches visual anthropology as a mode of inquiry capable of attending to the layered social worlds that remain obscured when industrial towns are seen only through familiar vocabularies of decline, pollution, nostalgia, or ruination.
The title Mining Memory, De-mining Pernik names the conceptual and methodological movement at the heart of the programme. “Mining memory” refers to the excavation of industrial life-worlds: embodied histories of labour, workers’ neighbourhoods, infrastructural remains, archives of socialist and pre-socialist modernity, and forms of solidarity that continue to shape attachments to place. “De-mining Pernik” names a methodological and political effort to work through the sedimented images through which late industrial towns are often framed as exhausted, polluted, ruined, violent, or simply left behind. Drawing on reflexive and experimental visual traditions, the summer school asks how the camera can become a situated method for rethinking perception, representation, and ethnographic encounter. In doing so, it treats Pernik as a terrain of unresolved and unevenly distributed futures, where memory, damage, reuse, speculation, and imagination continue to produce new claims on industrial space.
WHEN
2 to 9 August
Sunday to Sunday
WHERE
Mining Directorate The historic building in the heart of Pernik will serve as our base throughout the programme, providing a shared space for lectures, workshops and production hub.
For more than a century, Pernik has been shaped by coal, steel and energy. As one of Bulgaria’s principal industrial centres, the city played a pivotal role in the country’s industrialisation, supplying energy, raw materials and labour that fuelled economic development throughout the twentieth century. Mining complexes, power generation, heavy industry and workers’ infrastructures transformed both the landscape and the social fabric of the region, leaving traces that remain visible in the city today.
FORMAT
day 1-2
Phase 1 | Contexts, Questions & Methods
Introduction to the historical, social and environmental contexts of Pernik and the broader questions surrounding late industrial landscapes, memory, labour, infrastructure, representation and future imaginaries. Through lectures, discussions and practical workshops, participants will be introduced to visual anthropology, sensory ethnography, ethnographic filmmaking, photography, soundscaping, interviewing, archives and living history methods.
day 3-5
Phase 2 | Collaborative Fieldwork
Collaborative research in Pernik through observation, walking methods, conversations, photography, sound recording, archival exploration and ethnographic film practice. Participants will develop projects that emerge directly from encounters, stories and places discovered in the field.
day 6-7
Phase 3 | Reflection & Production
Editing, collective reflection and project development. Participants will work with their field materials to develop short visual ethnographic projects and share their research outcomes. Throughout the programme, the historic Mining Directorate building will serve as the school’s shared workspace, meeting point and production hub.
THE PROGRAM IS ORGANIZED BY:
Visual Research Center for Perception and Society (Sofia, Bulgaria)
Our work focuses on inspiring a new generation of visionaries to drive meaningful cultural transformation and tackle the pressing social dynamics of today’s rapidly changing world. On the crossroad between the East and the West, we combine visual methods with empirical research, we create opportunities for young creatives and communities to connect and view the world from diverse perspectives, explore cultural narratives, and foster public dialogue.
Visual Anthropology Center (Belgrade, Serbia)
VAC is one of the most established independent platforms for visual anthropology and ethnographic filmmaking in Southeast Europe. Drawing on over a decade of experience through its long-running School of Visual Anthropology, VAC has developed a distinctive methodology that brings together anthropologists, filmmakers, artists and ethnomusicologists in collaborative field-based research. Their work has helped establish a unique regional model where fieldwork, audiovisual production and critical inquiry unfold as part of a shared research process.
Participation fee: €400
The price includes:
– Full participation in the programme / lectures, workshops and mentoring/
– Fieldwork activities and access to shared working spaces
– 6 day stay is Pernik + 1 meal a day
*Full program and additional information will be provided after application
