77 ½

Iskra Blagoeva and Valentina Sciarra's project begins as an exploration of women's rights and rituals in Bulgaria. Over the last two years, the artists have been visiting different places in the country to learn more about herb collecting. Their work is driven by an inner impulse to rethink the threads that connect us to the past and traditions in the present. The elusive sense of belonging, community, creation and transmission of knowledge across generations of women today.
Exploring them is a personal journey to the self through the deep roots of ancestral memory and heritage.

77 ½ are the herbs to be gathered for winter, with no name for the last half - it is a cure for a mysterious, unknown disease. For the authors, this illness is the sadness brought on by the anxiety and stress of living in the present day.
Whether there is a cure for sadness becomes a question whose answer Iskra Blagoeva and Valentina Sciarra seek in the bodily and spiritual restoration of broken ties with nature and community. Their work affirms the dignity and power of the female world and energy beyond the conservatism of patriarchal society in a series of photographs, sound and video works, and performance documentation.

77 ½ is the first exhibition co-produced by the CCA Toplocentrala by open invitation. It is supported by a jury composed of Katia Anguelova (curator, director of Kunstverein (Milano)), Viktoria Draganova (curator, director of Swimming Pool, Sofia), Vladiya Mihaylova (curator, head of the Visual Arts Department at CCA Toplocentrala). The co-production of artistic projects is an essential part of the activities of CCA Toplocentrala, expressing the Centre's mission to support active artists and bold authorial ideas and the desire to develop processes and dialogue in art in contemporary times.

Iskra Blagoeva and Valentina Sciarra are among the active artists on the contemporary art scene in Bulgaria.
Iskra Blagoeva was born in 1978 in Sofia. She graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Applied Arts, Vienna in 2007. Her artistic work includes paintings, objects and installations. Iskra took part in group shows in Austria, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, Serbia, France and Bulgaria. Iskra Blagoeva is a winner of the National Competition for Young Artists, Critics and Curators of St. Cyril and St. Methodius International Foundation. Winner of the competition for young artists at the European Center for Culture and Debate GRAD (Belgrade). BAZA Award and Lingen Art Award nominee.

Valentina Sciarra was born in Rome, Italy in 1983. After completing an LL.M in law and a range of specialist photography courses, Valentina Sciarra received a BA with honors from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma (Rome, Italy) in 2013, with a thesis on "Les espaces en friches" (Wastelands in the Urban Space), written during a study program at Villa Arson, Ecole Nationale supérieure d’art in Nice, France.
She currently lives and works in Rome, Italy and in Sofia, Bulgaria where she completed an MA in Sculpture at the National Academy of Arts in 2018.
Valentina received the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award in 2019 and 2018, and was the recipient of a fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany in 2020, in the context of East European exchange program. In 2022, she participated at the 14 European Biennale Manifesta Pristina – Kossovo in the collective exhibition curated by ICA Sofia.