“ECOLOGICAL BAROQUE” – a Facade Intervention by Daniela Kostova
May 16 – June 15, 2026
Opening: May 16, 2026, 7:00 PM
Eco Museum with Aquarium
“Ecological Baroque” is a façade intervention that activates the bricked-up windows of the Ruse Eco Museum, transforming them into a stage for images that communicate climatic tension and ecological anxiety. These architectural openings, stripped of their original function, become “frames” where the gaze does not pass through but lingers and unfolds as thought.
Within these blind windows appear large-scale figures of children, on whose heads storks have built their nests. Their hair transforms into baroque structures — at once ornate and overloaded, accumulating waste, traces of time, and the weight of consumerism. The image thus combines an aesthetic of excess with a critique of ecological decay.
The children in this visual system are not decorative elements, but carriers of the future — witnesses to a transformation already underway. They appear as vulnerable, alert, and tense figures, placed within the architecture of the “closed” window, where the future materializes in the present.
The stork — strongly embedded in the cultural memory of the region and a symbol of return and cyclicality — becomes here an indicator of ecological imbalance. Changing migration patterns and unstable habitats call into question the very rhythm of nature. If the return is interrupted, a deep cultural and natural continuity is also broken.
The nests within the composition are constructed as an archive of the Anthropocene — accumulations of natural and synthetic materials in which waste becomes a new aesthetic, yet unsettling structure. Baroque excess is rewritten through the plasticity of contemporary debris and its persistent presence.
“Ecological Baroque” activates the façade not as a boundary, but as a surface of articulation. Architecture begins to communicate with the internal and external tensions of the present, connecting ecology, memory, and visual culture.
In this intervention, children and storks exist within a shared field of anxiety and hope — the former as an image of the future, the latter as a sensitive indicator of ecological balance. The project poses the question of a world in which beauty and decay coexist, and where the façade becomes a site of ecological awareness.
