“The Forum for Civic Imagination” is a safe environment for artistic research on society – a special kind of creative environment where the synergy of the group dynamics meets the archetypal power of the image.

The FCI is dedicated to people from various creative professions, where personal experiences with social reality are reduced to their elementary perceptual qualities and turned into an expressive resource beyond the givens of the art form. It serves to construct a shared subjectivity by means of various creative and therapeutic practices in the context of the group as an instance of the wider social reality.

The FCI is a generator of sustainable artistic strategies based on the democratic potential of creative processes.

Therefore, it is a project for democracy of the imagination.

In 2023 the Forum has launched its first independent research project – Archetypes of Social Tension. It started as 12 personal stories of a tense social situation, shared by the participants, which were intuitively sculpted into 12 plastic objects made of refined clay.

Each object was given a specific name by its author and presented by him in the first person as a character to the others. Gradually, all the characters entered into a deep interaction with each other to get to know each other and arrange themselves in a common constellation by mutual consent.

In a second session of the Forum, the characters were presented interactively by their creators to a group of new participants, again in the first person, as living beings of flesh and blood. Each of the new participants was then asked to choose one character and to depict it intuitively with both hands while blindfolded.

At the end of the second session, the new participants completed questionnaires to determine the authenticity of each image in relation to the personality of the respective character. The questionnaires were analysed according to 4 different criteria – achieved connection of the participant with himself, achieved connection with the character, the articulateness and the expressiveness of the image.

All elements of the research were presented during the first Open Session of the Forum for Civic Imagination on 04.03.2023 at RCCA Toplotsentrala, the video of which you can see here:
https://cutt.ly/5w043eOP

The activities in the current sessions of the Forum deal with the systemic relationships between the images in the constellation as well as with their psychological connection to the life-world of the creative personality at large. When the research is complete, the 12 images will be presented as inhabitants of a shared immersive space and used along with the masked character of the Emissary project for experiential work with tabooed and mystified aspects of Bulgarian cultural history.

The Free Sessions of the Forum were led together by me and another facilitator from the field of art therapy, systemic therapy and psychodrama like Petko Milakov, Teodora Gerginova. Mila Tsalova, Dr. Vyara Granitska and others.

The project was initiated thanks to the Creative Scholarships program of the Bulgarian National Culture Fund and selected for support by the programming team for performing arts of RCCA Toplocentrala for year 2023 and 2024.