Past Archives

MELBA MEETINGS 21: special edition with Marta Cerdà

In the last days of June, we get an extra dose of inspiration for the summer with one of the notable names on the European design scene – Marta Cerdà. The graphic designer, type designer and art director is a guest speaker at the 21st edition of the MELBA MEETINGS series to talk to the Bulgarian audience about the aesthetics of her diverse projects, the trial-and-error approach, an essential part of the creative process, and the connecting force between different design disciplines.

Over the years, Marta Cerdà (Barcelona, 1980) has received international recognition in various design forums around the world such as Type Director’s Club and Art Director’s Club, where she was awarded the ADC Young Gun Award. Her clients include brands and organizations such as The Guardian, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Die Zeit, Elle, Cosmopolitan, Penguin Books, Coca Cola, Nike, Converse, Spotify, Netflix, Apple, Volkswagen, Toyota, Victoria’s Secret, Panasonic, Deutsche Bank, Vogue, The New York Times and many more.

Marta Cerdà founded her own design studio in 2008 after several years of experience in different advertising agencies between Barcelona, Düsseldorf and Munich. Since then, she has dedicated herself to numerous international commissions as graphic designer, illustrator, art director and typographer. Through various forms of design, Marta Cerdà impressively synthesizes illustration, calligraphy and graphic design in her numerous projects.

Special cover Vogue, 2021

70 years sports club Castellers de Vilafranca, 2018

MELBA MEETINGS 21 will take place on 29 September at 7:00 PM at the independent space for contemporary art and culture Derida Stage (32 Tsar Samuil Street). Admission to the event is free thanks to our longtime partners Fashion Days. The project is realized with the support of the National Culture Fund under the One Year Grant program. For more news – follow the event on Facebook here.

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MELBA MEETINGS is part of MELBA DESIGN INITIATIVES by Komplekt. Within MELBA MEETINGS we present current projects by local design heroes that are remarkable for their approach. Experiences are shared about their realization, and the ideas, details and processes behind each of them are on focus.

MELBA LIVE XIII with NOLAN GILES

This is the 13th edition of our beloved format MELBA LIVE and first for 2021. Well, we’ve left behind a year of only digital events. Crossing our fingers this would be a different one and we’ll be able to welcome you some time soon in a hall somewhere in central Sofia. Enough of the gloom and regrets, because we have a splendid occasion to get you in front of your screens and hop in a Zoom live streaming this end of January.

Melba Live welcomes a very special guest for its first 2021 edition. Nolan Giles is the renowned design editor of Monocle and host of the superbly curated radio show Monocle on Design. Meet him live online to get a glimpse of his view on what are some of the major shifts one can expect when it comes to design and architecture impact in everyday quality of life.

Nolan Giles has been covering major events in the design and architecture spheres and translating their meaning and influence in an engaging voice for years now, bestowing him the credit of a connoisseur and an important critic for the discipline. His articles and the radio show he is hosting are making sense of what is valuable or detrimental, and what could be a transformative movement with future implications for everybody. Nolan Giles has traveled the world and met with some of protagonists leading design and architecture to new fields, revealing their effects in social, political, environmental, educational, entrepreneurial and lifestyle matters. Nolan Giles tries to keep a healthy dose of critical rhetoric when it comes to overviews and predictions.

MELBA LIVE XIII will take place on the 28th of January at 19:00 in ZOOM. Registration is free thanks to our favorite partners Fashion Days and via Eventbrite here. For news and updates – check the Facebook event.

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MELBA LIVE is part of the Melba Design Initiatives created and curated by Studio Komplekt. They present remarkable in their approach projects by local design heroes in various fields of design in an inspiring and honest ways.

MELBA LIVE XI

The eleventh edition of our favorite format MELBA LIVE boldly steps into digital territories and takes advantage of the pandemic situation by presenting distant heroes of Bulgarian design through Zoom conversations. Directly reporting from Majorca and London, we learn about the surprising and incredible professional research of three internationally recognized talents, covering the topics of biomaterials, more humane furniture in maternity wards and ethical crafts. We announce with undisguised pride and excitement the three speakers at our upcoming June event:

NINELA IVANOVA defines herself as a design strategist and thinker. Devoted to interdisciplinary practices, she curiously tries to predict a more meaningful application of design through harnessing scientific processes and natural materials. After seven years of in-depth study of mycelium at Kingston University in London, Ninela is now a PhD and a skilfull master on a wide range of head-turning ideas for a more noble future through new developments in technology, art, design, textiles and fashion, all inspired by bacteria, fungi and molds. Her name became quite popular due to her work on the collection of furniture and lighting MYCELIUM+TIMBER together with Sebastian Cox, developed from woven English ash, engulfed in Fomes fomentarius (mycelium). The project has been included in several exhibitions and recognized as exceptional and contributing significantly to the construction of materials for the furniture industry from renewable sources. (pictures by Petr Krejci)

We come across STILIYANA MINKOVSKA and her violet ultra attractive upholstered furniture as if from the decor of a futuristic spaceship through an article in the media giant DEZEEN. Following a swift connection and exchange of emails, it became clear that Stiliana is quite the multitalented and bright figure. She graduated as an architect, with a serious inclination towards interiors, product design and photography (we also add great style and open personality). After winning one of four residencies in the renowned program for young talents at the Design Museum in London in 2019, she came up with a revolutionary development for the type, function and use of furniture in maternity wards. All the details about Ultima Thule and more professional insights come from Stiliana herself at the end of the month in Melba Live №11. Can’t wait.

ELIA NEDKOV loves to cross various artistic disciplines and rightly cannot be fit into just one specific professional framework. Interior and furniture designer, architect, experimenter, artistic director, curator, photographer… He has a plethora of creative experiences and an amazingly interesting professional path which account to his stories being like magic tales captivating dreams and liberating the spirit. We contact him from Majorca, where he lives with his creative and life partner – Anna-Alexandra (pictured above) – with reflections on the values of craft production by local craftsmen and the provocation of the pandemic to pay attention to the slow life and valuable goods around us. The focus is on his latest brand – e.n_bags – ethical, stylish and gorgeously beautiful.

The 11-th edition of MELBA LIVE will take place on the 25th of June at 17:00 in ZOOM. More info on registering (for free) coming soon.
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MELBA LIVE HITS ITS 10th Issue

Tell us about time flying by fast! Without noticing, it’s been two years since we started gathering favorite local design heroes into regular meetings, during which they share details of a new project and lift the curtain of some behind the scenes creative work processes. Open and engaging to everyone with an interest in visual culture, Melba’s live events have become anticipated occasions to learn more about the power of design and how the discipline contributes to our overall well-being.

This edition has been marked by a global pandemic, postponed and eventually aired as a series of three consecutive online live meetings in Zoom. Thank you for keeping us company and check the video with the full lectures:

In our jubilee 10th issue, we sought to present projects that are team-driven and dependent on the interplay between different talents and abilities.

Kapka Kuneva barely needs introduction. Distinguished on numerous occasions for her artistic design of books, specifically embracing the paper as a medium to shape illustrations, she teaches at the National Academy of Arts “Book and Print Graphics”. Last year Kapka Kuneva gathers a star cast of contemporary female artists each one to draw a portrait for the book”I am a Bulgarian” by the writer Petya Alexandrova. The publication gains instant popularity, and in February the works of art had their own focus in the exhibition “History in Portraits – 40 Women Who Changed Bulgaria”.

Yana Tankovska is among the well-established and recognized contemporary designers of jewellery and interior accessories. Several years ago along with some other close colleagues of hers establishes the gallery FORMAT. Their team goes through a variety of professional challenges and closes the location only to resurrect it last year in kvARTal. Such vicissitudes teach the most important lessons in life, and Yana has something to share about how to manage a collective creative activity, what dreams may turn into and the normality of leaving a favorite project..

Delcho Delchev is one of the brightest transformers in our milieu. An architect by education and a tireless activist by heart, he is one of the founders of the famous Transformatori group. He subsequently turned his attention to an even grander adventure – the establishment of a Bulgarian branch of the international SmartFabLab. Thanks to numerous collaborations and openness to experimentation, the laboratory has become a successful incubator for meaningful prototypes, some of which are already being mass-produced and marketed as sustainable products. Delcho will be in the company of Nona Tsekova and together they will talk about some of the bright collaborations in SmartFabLab.

From the very beginning of Melba Live Fashion Days has been our friend and supporter, for which we are extremely grateful. Together we always strive to have a small surprise for the audience related to the work of the designers of the Melba Archive. This time, it will be a poster-zine with an illustration by the artist Daniela Yankova.

Link to the Facebook event.

MELBA LIVE #8

On the 22nd of October from 18:30 at Generator, Sofia, MELBA LIVE 8 will present three projects, collaborations between: interior design and design thinking; production design and digital art; poetry and animation. Traditionally, every two months, MELBA LIVE meets the Bulgarian audience with local design heroes who revel ongoing and remarkable projects.

Antonina Ilieva from the architectural studio DontDIY and Elina Zheleva from launchlabs will tell more about their collaboration – how the work between interior designers and specialists in design thinking can contribute to a better experience for their clients.

The visual artists Eva Ventova and Vladislav Iliev – Vladzen will present an installation – the result of a combination between production design and visual arts.

Vesela Dancheva from Compote Collective will reveal more details about a project which is combination between poetry and animation.

About MELBA LIVE
MELBA LIVE are series of curated meetings, at which we are getting acquainted with up-to-date and remarkable projects realised by local design heroes. The invited guests are sharing experiences, as the main focus is the ideas, details and processes behind each project. Likewise, the online MELBA archive, here we rely on the quality and deliberate blending of design spheres and the aggregation of strong ideas with potential to make a change and develop a better environment.

FREE ENTRANCE:
Facebook event

MELBA LIVE #7

What a better season than summer for an ice-cold melba. Our compact team is heading to the epicentre of summer vacations – the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. Burgas is the host, and our lecturers have everything to do with the sea.

LABORATORY FOR PLAY | ARCH. MARIANA SARBOVA and ARCH. DESISLAVA STOYANOVA

The Lab For Play is an initiative dedicated to the unconventional design of children’s environments. The mission of the project includes both reconstruction of abandoned or neglected sites and the construction of new ones with the thought of nourishing the imagination, empathy and physical culture. The founders of the lab Arch. Mariana Sarbova and arch. Dessislava Stoyanova have been working for years in Burgas and are associated with significant contemporary architectural events in Bulgaria such as the reconstruction of Magazia 1 (with a special award from the competition “Building of the Year” 2016) and the competition for the reconstruction of Toplocentrala in Sofia (winner for the implementation of the project in 2017).

ВИЖ!| KAMELIA VELICHKOVA and MAY STEFANOVA

This August marks the 7th birthday of the independent print edition ВИЖ!, which celebrates the work of Bulgarian visual creatives. From the beginning the magazine’s mission has been to engage different audiences in valuable contemporary culture initiatives. Among the chaos of coming and going media platforms ВИЖ! is an example of high-quality niche product, which we hope will be increasingly consumed. Two of the founders – Kamelia Velichkova and Maya Stefanova – will delve into the context of their work and the choices they make about the visual layout and content creation in order to have a new issue at the beginning of each month.

SQUARE | BOJIDARA YONOVA

The Bulgarian fashion brand SQUARE is famous for its collections that are carefully influenced by hand-drawn illustrations and a consistent line of sports and casual clothes and accessories for people with an open-minded look. The feeling of being connected to the sea, sun, wind and mountains makes SQUARE a favorite label of different generations with a sense of design and freedom. MELBA LIVE 7 welcomes SQUARE’s founder – Bojidara Ionova, who tells more about the design of the latest spring / summer 2019 collection. She also prepared a special collage gift for the first 100 guests of the event, realized by our partner Fashion Days.

(photo of collection SS’19 – Vassil Germanov, collage – Божидара Йонова)

when: Thursday, August 8, 18:30

where: Флора Бургас

entrance: free

Facebook event