Open Lecture Petja Ivanova

Poetic Futures: Ecological Intimacy and the Magical Consciousness of the Living World

• Date: 05.12.2025
• Time: 12:30
• Place: Studio 4

Petja Ivanova is an artist, researcher, and performer from Bulgaria, working through her Studio for Poetic Futures & Speculative Ecologies. Her practice moves between somatic intelligence, planetary consciousness, and technological critique, cultivating new forms of knowing rooted in vulnerability, the spirit of the living world, and embodied care. Through installation, performance, and text, she asks: what if softness were a system of knowledge?

This talk explores poetic consciousness as a design methodology for 2051. Starting from somatic practices, dream-cartographies, and bio-material listening, you are invited to consider ecological intimacy and enchantment as technologies for imagining better futures. How do rivers communicate? How do materials feel? What does it mean to dream with the living world?

Drawing from posthumanist theory, somatic epistemologies, folklore, and my own artistic research practice, I propose that feeling is a form of intelligence and can serve as a design tool that enables us to collaborate with ecosystems rather than extract from them. In a world where digital infrastructures attempt to script our desires (Wendy Chun), poetic attention becomes a counter-extractive practice. Enchantment becomes resistance. Vulnerability becomes methodology.