Yoana Buzova (originally: Йоана Бузова in bulgarian) is a Bulgarian-born artist and educator. Navigating the world with a body shaped by ongoing maintenance and adaptation. A proud jack of all trades, she is a repair witch, magnetic tape aficionado, soapmaking alchemist, community hairdresser, gardener, and crooked stitcher. She creates installations, performances, and tools that explore frugality, accessibility, transformability, and listening. Her works invite brief encounters and shared fictions, attending to the overlooked, the broken, and the quietly resistant. Yoana holds a Master degree from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Tutor at the Willem de Kooning Academy. Member of Varia. Based in Rotterdam (NL).
Are you listening now? - Lie down in the dark. Soak in bat sounds from Rotterdam nights, bouncing through metal pipes and warehouse bones. Transducers vibrate the building's own pipes, spreading the sound through it, while visuals trace the flight patterns and traces bats and insects leave in the air.
The work begins inside our archive of sound observations, bats recorded over a year of returning, listening. Not to document, but to hear them moving through the city we share.
Part field recording, part fever dream. Bats imagined through human ears and machines that don't quite get it right. It is listening as speculative practice. A way of staying with bodies that are not ours.
Collaboration with Matthias Hurtl. Developed for Wild Summer of Art at Brutus.
Leave a Gap Like a Door - Leave a Gap Like a Door is an installation developed as part of the research residency Cripping Cultural Work at MaMA. It works with the question of how cultural work measures value through productivity, continuity, and clean timelines, and pushes back against the way care and chronic illness get translated into so-called CV gaps, time counted as absence. Time slows into maintenance. Pacing, refusal, adaptation. Video, voice, textiles, and a makeshift fort sit in a non-hierarchical relationship, each carrying the project's weight. A spoken text holds the narrative through the video. A sensory chair routes that voice through the body, so the work can be experienced beyond hearing. From the back of the armchair, a fort begins. A shelter from productive time, a room for crip time.And I'll Be Back to Perform Health for You - How do normative ideas around time and productivity shape the work of cultural institutions? What if accessibility was the starting point for artistic programs developing? What would cultural institutions look like if they were reimagined to center the needs of our bodyminds? At present, disability and chronic illness are systemically underrepresented within the cultural sector, both in Rotterdam and more widely. The publication comes out of the Cripping Cultural Work research-residency at Showroom MaMA, Rotterdam. Cripping Cultural Work was developed from the understanding that disabled, mad, chronically ill and neurodivergent artists often face structural barriers to working and sustaining a practice within the art field. The publication documents the residency. It was co-written and assembled by Ari Ralph, Ashley Nkechi Igwe, Yoana Buzova, flora valeska woudstra, Felicitas Lenz, Charli Herrington, Giu Di Dato and supported by the whole team of showroom MaMA.Self-Medicated Practices - Self-Medicated Practices is a research thread developed by Yoana Buzova and Alice Strete, part of Varia's Homebrewing thread. It grew out of a shared interest in learning from our own varied experiences, gathering new insights into DIY healthcare, whether that means self-built devices or other forms of healing that exist outside or alongside the medical system.
The publication is where the project takes physical form. Its shape, open bound, non-linear, unfinished, follows the same lineage as scrapbooks and recipe books, places that never separated conventional medical knowledge from home remedy, evidence from speculation, holding both without asking one to answer to the other. Pages can be added as new sessions happen, and anyone is welcome to contribute their own. Each addition stays a fixed record of the moment it was made, even as the whole keeps growing. It currently holds three parts: the first on medical devices, the second accompanying a public gathering on (mostly Western) herbalism, the rootstock of what we now call conventional medicine, and the third on self-diagnosis.Listening to the Cracks - Ongoing collaboration with Matthias Hurtl. "Listening to the Cracks" is a research project that delves into the often-inaudible sounds of urban nature. The project explores "strange kinship" with urban non-human animals, particularly those often overlooked or labeled as pests. We investigate the “cracks” in urban environments, the untold and unexpected spaces where life thrives. Using field recordings, sonic analysis, and public sound walks, we focus on deep listening as a way to move away from anthropocentric empathy and instead engage with these creatures on their own terms, exploring how they persist in human-dominated spaces.Recipes for Uncanny Times - Recipes for Uncanny Times is an installation built from magnetic tape and an old landline phone, and an oversized, resonating, sculpture of chewing gum, spat pink onto the floor. All worn soft by use. Dialling in gives you a menu of oral narratives, set in the past, present or an imagined future. Voices carrying the kind of knowledge usually passed hand to hand, not written down. What to do when there's little to eat. What to say when it isn't safe to say it. What gets kept quiet and what gets kept alive. Using the recipe, an ordinary form for passing knowledge on, the work sits at the blur between fact and fiction. Through sound and materiality, it draws you into disorienting, unsettled spaces that sit close to a fragile present, shaped by overlapping global crises.Varia Afhaal - Varia Afhaal are thematic gatherings based around the common experiences, everyday technologies and home economics of food preparation. With Varia Afhaal we create a context in which we can collectively develop a deeper understanding of sometimes abstract socio-economic and political topics by learning with and from each other through discussions, sketching, research, cooking and eating. Varia Afhaal is organized together with Alice Strete and Simon Browne. Recipes on the Radio - Recipes are more than just instructions, whether it is food, or a recipe for disaster. Recipes are deviant, magical and political. Recipes on the Radio was a radio show streamed on the WORM Radio and recorded mostly in the WORM kitchen. It features discussions about food and it's implication in society and culture, bringing together the hosts, Alice Strete and Yoana Buzova, as well as several guests throughout the show. The recording of the show, as well as the recipes that we cooked in each episode are available in an online archive.Cranked Tapes - Cranked Tapes explores the disobedient potential of a ‘vocal’ bicycle. It turns a bicycle into a sound-making machine that talks back. Cassette recorders are wired into the bike, powered by the motion of pedalling, so it records and plays back sound as you ride, building an audio landscape shaped by the act of cycling itself.
The research began during a residency at Paviljoen aan Het Water, Charlois, part of the Aloardi Exchange Programme. Together with Charlois residents, we built an audio bike ride route, published as a map and cycling manual, where each stop pairs a location with a passage from the last book of Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life. It offers a way to cycle the neighbourhood's sound sites, tracing how mechanical, organic and social rhythms, and noise, shape everyday life.
The project grew through public workshops, where participants built and modified their own versions. Using and repairing obsolete technology as much as a way of building community as a way of building the bike.
Relaxing on the waves - Relaxing on the waves mixes meditative and nature samples with noise and social anxieties into an uncanny magnetic tape radio play and performance. It is entirely performed with multiple cassette tape players and cassette tape loops, raw as well as manipulated through a modular synthesizer. The radio play is recorded and composed by Yoana Buzova and Matthias Hurtl. This work was commissioned by the WORM Sound Studios and Dr.KlangendumBibliotecha - Bibliotecha is a framework to facilitate the local distribution of digital publications within a small community. It relies on a microcomputer running open-source software to serve books over a local WiFi hotspot. Using the browser to connect to the library one can retrieve or donate texts. Bibliotecha proposes an alternative model of distribution of digital texts that allows specific communities to form and share their own collections. Bibliotecha was featured on the cover of [lire+écrire] and presented at AMRO festival in Linz (AT), Bureau Europa, Maastricht (NL), Hackers and Designers, Amsterdam (NL), Radical Networks Conference, New York (USA), Dan D festival, Zagreb (CR), as well as featured in Networks of One's Own: three takes on taking care publication.Apophenia - Apophenia reflects on the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random data. Audio-visual installation, 16 mm film, multi-channel audio. A ring of man-made machines exists around the earth. Among them secret satellites, lost cosmonauts, objects quietly floating in space, most likely to remain in orbit for the next billion years. Collaboration with Matthias Hurtl.
Leave a message - leaveamessage is/was a/in process. It is a participatory project, a network of voice mailboxes, that allow members of the public to record and distribute audio messages in public space. The boxes are installed in different counties, cities, contexts. Connected to each other, the boxes provide playful, performative moments for strangers to break from their routine and enter into a network of anonymous voices, traveling an unplanned journey through cityscapes. hosted in multiple locations in The Netherlands, Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Brasil, Greece. Presented at AMRO Festival, Linz (AT), TENT, Rotterdam (NL), Athens Digital Arts Festival, Athens (GR), VHDG , Leeuwarden (NL), Dan D Festival, Zagreb (CR)
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