Martina Yordanova | Soft and Wet

“Soft and Wet” is a curatorial research project that explores textile as a material of continuity across time, geography, and political change. Beginning with Bulgarian carpet traditions and extending through twentieth-century textile practices to contemporary artistic production, the project investigates how weaving, stitching, and fiber work continue to carry memory, labor, and resistance.

Rather than following a linear historical narrative, the research approaches textile as an interconnected field where vernacular traditions, modernist experimentation, and contemporary practices coexist and inform one another. Textile emerges not as a decorative medium, but as a site where questions of gender, migration, care, ecological fragility, and social transformation become materially visible.

During the residency in Athens, the project will expand through archival research, studio visits, and conversations with artists, craftspeople, and researchers working with textile across the Balkans and the Mediterranean. The region’s long histories of exchange, movement, and cultural circulation offer a rich context for examining how textile techniques, materials, and narratives travel across borders while remaining deeply connected to local experience.

“Soft and Wet” proposes textile as both material and method: a way of understanding how knowledge, memory, and communities persist through adaptation rather than permanence.