Work statement

Boyana Aleksova’s eco-activist art practice brings attention to environmental issues through playful processes of art making, socially engaged participatory events and visual art publications.

The artist led a collaborative eco-activist performance that took place on 12 June 2021 at the river Struma in Novi Chiflik, Kyustendil, Bulgaria, bringing together 40 volunteers from diverse backgrounds. They worked to free three kilometres of the river’s coast from plastic waste, which were tangled in trees, bushes and drowned in the river herself. This amass of refuse is said to have been brought downstream in February 2021, due to a high rise of the level of Struma as a result of heavy rains. With the rise, she collected tons of waste from illegal landfills that locals created near the river, including a large illegal landfill formed by the Nevestino Council in 2020.

The volunteers collected 150 bags of waste over a period of four hours, subsequently loading the accumulated debris onto a lorry, returning it back to its’ origins in Kyustendil. Here it was parked in the middle of the town square for an hour, for locals to see and acknowledge their gathered waste.

For Us raised awareness about pollution and acted as a call for action, yet, through connective aesthetics, it brought like-minded people together who built relationships while creating art. Thus, the art was not in the creation of physical work, but rather, the encounter between each participant with others, animals and nature, became the art itself.

This event was later recorded in Aleksova’s second artist publication ‘For Us’.