Truth is not found. It is made — drawn, printed, assembled and circulated until the construction disappears and only the belief remains. What does it take for an image to become evidence? For a line on paper to become a border, a border to become a territory, a territory to become something worth dying for?

Edward Gorey's Q.R.V. series opens with a provocation: a remedy of unknown composition, promoted with solemn verse and the full typographic authority of institutional address, for a condition that is never named. Credibility, Gorey understood, does not require truth — only the right visual grammar. Alongside him, the Bulgarian poet and mail artist Vesselin Sariev mobilised postcards and visual poetry as unofficial infrastructure, moving small, portable claims through systems not designed to carry them. From radically different political realities, both understood that graphic form is never neutral — that the choice of typeface, the weight of a border, the repetition of an image are themselves political acts.

What happens when fiction circulates long enough to harden into history? When the document outlasts the intention of those who made it? When the portrait, drawn not from memory but from imagination, becomes indistinguishable from evidence?

The works gathered here treat graphic practice not as illustration but as epistemology — a way of tracing how images come to organise what societies accept as real, and what it might mean, in this moment, to see otherwise.

Inspired by this year’s FIG topic, Fountain Superblue will present a hunter-gatherer ceramic workshop, drawing from the reality of our natural surroundings.

Over the course of an afternoon, participants will be invited to reconnect with the material world through walking, collecting, and making. The experience will begin with an exploration of the higher parts of Sofia’s South Park, where natural objects will be gathered and used as tools within the ceramic process.

The workshop will continue in the Fountain Superblue studio, where each participant will handbuild a vessel, working directly with the collected materials through imprinting, pressing, and transformation of clay.

Beginners are welcome; no previous experience with clay is needed.

Tsvetomira Borisova is a visual artist based in Sofia who works primarily with ceramics, drawing, and text. In her practice, she explores the relationship between the individual and their environment, focusing on themes such as alienation, escapism, and intimacy. In 2022, she was the resident artist at Sarieva Art Atelier, which concluded with her first solo show, “Cool S” (2022). In 2024, she became the recipient of the BAZA Award, which led to her participation in Residency Unlimited, New York.

In early 2026, she opened her studio to the public. Fountain Superblue has since become a space for exploring the functionality of art objects, while also developing into a setting for gatherings, conversations, and intimate workshops.

Mediated Encounters (Mise-en-scène) explores the unstable boundary between reality and its representation through the languages of scenography, architecture, and fabricated images. Situated within the wider framework of Fabricated Realities, the exhibition examines how images, spaces, and structures acquire authority, and what occurs when that authority begins to erode. Drawing from theories of scenography as a relational and affective practice, the project approaches space not as a passive backdrop but as an active agent that positions and repositions bodies, objects, and perceptions.

At the center of the exhibition lies the transformation of the image across dimensions and contexts: from flat surface to spatial object, from document to décor, from monument to façade. Through fragmented architectural structures, suspended scenic elements, and façade-like constructions, the exhibition investigates how scenography enables the re-imagination of familiar environments while revealing the mechanisms through which realities are staged, mediated, and manipulated. The presented forms oscillate between ruin and stage set, material presence and illusion, suggesting spaces that are simultaneously collapsing and being reconstructed.

The exhibition emerges from Yana Abrasheva’s long-term engagement with scenography and image production, informed by her parallel practice as a graphic designer working within the film industry. Her position within cinematic production gives her direct insight into the construction of visual worlds, the fabrication of environments, and the subtle mechanisms through which space becomes narrative. This experience forms an important foundation for the exhibition, situating her artistic practice between the disciplines of visual art, set design, and cinematic image-making.

Abrasheva’s research is particularly informed by the phenomenon of facadism and the gradual decay of modernist architecture in Sofia and across Bulgaria — a subject that has remained central to her artistic work. Many buildings once conceived as ideological monuments to collective futures now survive as preserved surfaces detached from their original social function. Their façades remain intact while new structures are inserted behind them, transforming architecture into a hollow shell: a scenographic gesture that echoes the production of fabricated realities in contemporary media culture.

This tension becomes particularly resonant when placed against the rapid expansion and international visibility of Bulgaria’s film industry. While modernist architecture increasingly exists in states of abandonment, erosion, or cosmetic preservation, the cinematic sector continues to flourish, generating new images, sets, and fictional environments. Mediated Encounters (Mise-en-scène) positions these parallel conditions against one another: the slow decay of built realities and the simultaneous “blooming” of industries dedicated to constructing new visual worlds.

Yana Abrasheva is a Sofia-based graphic designer and artist working across visual communication, research-based design, and curatorial and artistic practice. In 2021, she graduated with a BA in Graphic Design from the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague.

Her practice operates between graphic design, spatial research, scenography, and exhibition-making, with a focus on how visual languages construct cultural narratives and shape collective perception. Alongside her artistic work, she works as a freelance graphic designer within the cultural sector, developing visual identities, printed matter, publications, and digital communication materials for artists, galleries, and cultural institutions. She has served as graphic designer for Punta & Posta Gallery and has contributed to large-scale international projects, including exhibition catalogues, communication campaigns, and visual identity systems.

In parallel, Abrasheva has worked within the props and art departments of the film and advertising industries, further informing her interest in materiality, constructed environments, and mediated realities.

Since 2021, she has participated in numerous group exhibitions and residency programs and has contributed to the curatorial development of FIG. Festival for Illustration and Graphics during both its 3rd and 5th editions, supporting the festival’s growing international presence and interdisciplinary discourse.

Pavlos Ioannides’ work explores the tension between private and public life, shaped by experiences of growing up in Cyprus in an environment where violence, solitude, and hidden sexuality were concealed behind a façade of normalcy.

In the vitrine window, a life-size figure — the artist’s own body rendered in negative, light emerging from darkness like an X-ray — hovers between presence and absence. Repeated across two cotton curtains of differing opacity and lit from within, it unsettles the passing viewer: is this a house window? Am I allowed to look? The word Jump! runs across the surface — command, invitation, echo of a childhood game.

In the foreground, a strip of photographic negatives hangs suspended like a votive offering, carrying signs of hidden domestic experiences and desires.

Pavlos Ioannides (b. 1995, Nicosia, Cyprus) is a Berlin-based artist working across drawing, installation, photography, and text. His practice examines conditions of freedom and restriction through works that engage with borders, architecture, and collective memory.

Growing up in the divided city of Nicosia has deeply informed his practice, foregrounding how political structures shape movement, perception, and everyday life. Working with materials such as charcoal, metal, and textiles, he creates installations that evoke walls, enclosures, and thresholds.

Recent works incorporate collaborations with family members and materials connected to specific sites in Cyprus, embedding personal and collective histories within the work. Engaging questions of home, queerness, and resistance, his practice develops through territorial research, found materials, and site-responsive installations.

His work has been presented at NiMAC (Cyprus), Zilberman Gallery and AOA;87 Gallery (Germany), and Villa Arson (France) among others. He holds an MFA from Villa Arson and is currently in residence in Palermo with Kultur Ensemble Palermo, supported by the Goethe-Institut and the Institut français.

The workshop operates at the point where conceptual art and practical design begin to diverge. It asks whether design—particularly signage in urban, shared environments—is ever purely functional. From “ethnic” supermarkets to multilingual signage systems in banks and public institutions, the city is structured through codes that organize access and visibility. These codes can enforce exclusion, control, and hierarchy, but they also produce forms of community and belonging.

At the core of the workshop is a process of identifying functional elements within everyday design practices and reappropriating them to construct and share narratives. In other words, we look at how design communicates—and how it can be used to tell stories.

The workshop aims to open up conversations around shared spaces—conversations we engage in daily as a collective, and from which many of our projects emerge. Together, participants will develop a “quote” of a shared space, drawing on explorations of Sofia’s urban constellations. This space is not predefined by form (a streetfront, supermarket, or government office), but instead understood through a single criterion: that it is inherently shared.

Center for Peripheries is a collective operating at the intersection of social research and space-based art. It was founded by three artists who stem from Europe’s different peripheries (the Middle East, the Caucasus, the Balkans), but reside and collaborate in Berlin—one of Europe’s most significant centers, and the EU’s (statistically) most populous city—which has throughout recent history embodied the dialectic of East and West. Aiming to explore the relations of power and the mechanisms of othering within and beyond the far ends of this dialectic, Center for Peripheries operates through interventions themed around different notions of everyday life, expanding them into analyses of wider political contexts.

Current members of CfP are Roshanak Amini and Uroš Pajović.

A Matter of Adaptation surveys the leftovers of a society completely obsessed with producing, storing, archiving, posting, screenshotting, backing up, reposting, and doom-scrolling data. Entire cultures now live inside servers, timelines, cloud drives, forgotten passwords, and “link in bio” pages that pretend to be permanent but are actually hanging on by a thread. More fragile than the papyri of the ancient world, this giant digital archive survives only as long as the technologies and economic systems supporting it continue functioning. One server outage, one platform collapse, one expired subscription, and suddenly an entire civilisation becomes lost media.

The workshop begins with this anxiety and questions: What do we actually leave behind after posting ourselves online for decades? Which parts of internet culture survive long enough to become future mythology? What happens when screenshots become archaeological evidence, or when a TikTok audio is treated like a sacred chant from a lost society? Perhaps the blurry meme with impact font becomes more historically valuable than the official government archive. Perhaps the girl explaining her situationship lore in a 7-part TikTok survives longer than contemporary philosophy.

Within the workshop, internet remnants, interface fragments, AI-generated slop, clickbait spirituality, meme debris, failed utopias, and wellness scams become raw material for constructing fictional artefacts from the near future. Using the method of the Autopsy Table, participants will dissect and recombine these digital leftovers into fictional near-future artefacts that feel simultaneously familiar and deeply corrupted, like something recovered from a broken hard drive in the ruins of a server farm.

Gjorgji Despodov is a multidisciplinary artist from North Macedonia, currently based in The Hague, Netherlands. He holds a master’s degree in Non Linear Narrative from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. In 2025, he received the STRP Young ACT Award for his graduation project.

Despodov’s practice blends investigative methods with playful elements, rooted in storytelling, deeply engaging with the internet and digital culture. His work often employs familiar objects that reflect personal experiences while opening portals into speculative, world-building narratives. His work exists on the threshold between physical and digital environments.

He refers to his projects as provocotypes: prototypes that do not aim to resolve but to provoke, that insist on incompleteness as a method of critique. Unlike functional prototypes that strive toward optimisation, provocotypes thrive in friction. They are not answers but interruptions, creating spaces for dialogue and critical reflection.

Ameli M. Klein — curator of FIG. 6 — is a curator, writer, and researcher whose work investigates how cultural institutions produce and transmit ideology, and how visual and narrative forms shape collective understanding. She currently serves as director of Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, where she leads experimental exhibition-making and critical public programming. Her curatorial practice engages with the persistence of Enlightenment methodologies in contemporary institutions and explores how cultural narratives are constructed, contested, and transformed across contexts.

Center for Peripheries is a collective operating at the intersection of social research and space-based art. It was founded by three artists who stem from Europe’s different peripheries (the Middle East, the Caucasus, the Balkans), but reside and collaborate in Berlin — one of Europe’s most significant centers, and the EU’s (statistically) most populous city — which has throughout recent history embodied the dialectic of East and West. Aiming to explore the relations of power and the mechanisms of othering within and beyond the far ends of this dialectic, Center for Peripheries operates through interventions themed around different notions of everyday life, expanding them into analyses of wider political contexts. Current members of CfP are Roshanak Amini and Uroš Pajović.

Cem A. is an artist with a background in anthropology. He is known for running the art meme page @freeze_magazine and for his performances and site-specific installations. His work explores topics such as survival and alienation in the art world, often through a hyper- reflexive lens and collaborative projects. Cem A.’s selected solo exhibitions and installations include Louisiana Museum, Barbican Centre, Berlinische Galerie, and Museum Wiesbaden. His work was also included in documenta fifteen, Istanbul Modern, Mudam Luxembourg, Klima Biennale Vienna and 14, Biennial of Young Artists Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje. He has held lectures at Royal College of Art London, Central Saint Martins, HEAD Geneva, HDK Valand and Universität der Künste Berlin.

The first half of the workshop, “Meme-thinking,” draws on theories from media studies, cultural studies and art history to situate memes within a critical framework. In the second half, “Meme-making,” the participants go through the step-by-step process of making memes and start creating them together in a collaborative format.

In the vitrine window, a life-size figure — the artist’s own body rendered in negative, light emerging from darkness like an X-ray — hovers between presence and absence. Repeated across two cotton curtains of differing opacity and lit from within, it unsettles the passing viewer: is this a house window? Am I allowed to look? The word Jump! runs across the surface — command, invitation, echo of a childhood game.

Cem A. is an artist with a background in anthropology. He is known for running the art meme page @freeze_magazine and for his performances and site-specific installations. His work explores topics such as survival and alienation in the art world, often through a hyper- reflexive lens and collaborative projects.

Cem A.’s selected solo exhibitions and installations include Louisiana Museum, Barbican Centre, Berlinische Galerie, and Museum Wiesbaden. His work was also included in documenta fifteen, Istanbul Modern, Mudam Luxembourg, Klima Biennale Vienna and 14, Biennial of Young Artists Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje. He has held lectures at Royal College of Art London, Central Saint Martins, HEAD Geneva, HDK Valand and Universität der Künste Berlin.

The workshop is realised with the support of Goethe-Institut Bulgaria.