THE URBAN STORYTELLING COURSE
unlocks your writing and drawing skills for cultivating embodied awareness and architectural wisdom
You Will Learn How To:
- experience architecture through combined writing and drawing
- select, extract, evaluate and re-create spatial values
- imagine a transformation of a place through mixed media
- read the environment through your own spatial intelligence
- cultivate your own language of imagining places
- work with the spatial memory of emotional experience
CHOOSE YOUR WAY OF LEARNING
Most Popular
150 €
✔︎ 11 pre-recorded lessons (lifetime access)
✔︎ Downloadable worksheets for each lesson
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✔︎ BONUS: Audio recordings of all lessons
✔︎ BONUS: Access to our online Exhibition Studio community circle
✔︎ BONUS: Downloadable transcription booklet for each lesson
Best Spring Deal!
300 €
(full price 520 €)
✔︎ "Urban Storytelling" online course
✔︎ 11 weekly one on one drawing sessions with Viktorija (90 minutes)
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✔︎ BONUS: Audio recordings of all lessons
✔︎ BONUS: Access to our online Exhibition Studio community circle
✔︎ BONUS: Live online exhibition review of the works in the final 12th week of the programme
WHAT ARE THEY SAYING...
Ajda Žagar
"It is difficult to describe shortly such a deep experience like working with Viktorija. Our journey started not so long ago, and yet, it feels like we know each other since ever. In this journey, you discover you oldest companion – your own self. You learn to express, not because you must speak, to draw not because you must defend yourself. But only for the sake of pure enjoyment in exploring the world. And by discovering of the world – you enter a deeper meeting and discovery of yourself.
Viktorija introduced me to this world. She introduced language to soul and spirit. She thought me to let my hands be instruments, that do not demand systematic perfection, but yearn for leaving an imprint.
Line by line, I was slowly learning to talk to myself.
To give myself a voice.
To give myself a space.
So I was and I am discovering drawing, because it makes sense to be myself and to read the world in the way that I am reading it."
Maja Petrevska
"Working with my own personal architectural hero has been a life-changing experience. Within each one-on-one mentoring session, withing each collaborative wirting-drawing discussion, I felt like I was exploring my inner landscapes: how they reflect in my sensitive spatial explorations. I was always surprised by myself and by the new perception on space that I have developed during the session.
Viktorija has a way of guiding you back to your authentic Self by asking questions that really require some self reflection. Through the writing – drawing – speaking method, I developed a whole new perception on what architecture is or can be and how it can be interconnected with the other visual and literary arts. Through these sessions Viktorija also shows what a healthy working environment is but also what a healthy mentor – mentee dynamic is. She is encouraging, inspirational yet humble, selfless and loving and has a way of making you feel comfortable with your own vulnerability.
Through this course and while working with Viktorija, I have learned how to not be scared to make architecture personal and how to use my own voice in order to create an architecture that is in correspondence with my authentic Self. If I had the chance, I would’ve chosen Viktorija to be my mentor from my first year of architecture school till the final year of my master studies."
MEET VIKTORIJA
I am a poet and practicing architect, devoted to making, sharing and co-creating poem-drawings as processual and analytical instruments in architectural and urban research through design.
I have devoted the last 8 years of my career to discern how the intertwinement of writing and drawing techniques can enhance one's perceptiveness of the relationship between one's embodied experience and one's architectural design task. While cultivating and internationally exhibitng my own practice of design-driven poem-drawing, I deeply wished to share all that I learned through my most meaningful pedagogical encounters.
Standing against the traumatic cycle of suppressing the inner voice of the young human, I am driven by my restless desire to create a learning environment that starts from the student's conscious or unconscious gifts and affinities, from his/her inner unique personality and beauty.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is the Urban Storytelling Course for?
How much time is required each week for the Course?
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Is there a schedule for the Course?
Is any certificate for English knowledge required to join the course?
What is the difference between the Course and the Mentoring?
How long do the courses last?
Is there a Diploma at the end of the course?
Course Curriculum
Introductory Lesson
In the introductory lesson, Dr. Bogdanova is elaborating on the importance of the Undiscovered Self in different modalities of creating, with a special emphasis on architectural and urban design and research. While telling a summary of her story through visual narratives, she also speaks about what will you learn in this course and why is the holistic understanding of yourself valuable for your practice.
Lesson 1: Through the Eyes of Another
This lesson introduces you with examples on how a single theme can vary through different artistic mediums. It aims to encourage a shift of one’s own perspective into the experience of another, with a special emphasis on the balance between empathy and critical thinking.
Dr. Bogdanova argues that the ability to learn from other person’s perspective is as equally important as learning from one’s own embodied experience: your understanding of yourself with fresh eyes, influences your understanding of the place of research with a radical depth.
Lesson 2: The Inner Refuge
This lesson will offer you an experience of drawing as tool for revisiting the memory of your embodied experience, transforming it from a passive entity to an active medium of interpreting positive vibrations into your daily living.
You will approach the archive of your embodied experience as a ground for understanding your spatial value system, becoming more conscious about the origin of one's own criteria of 'good' and 'wrong' when forming an opinion or evaluating a specific aesthetic experience.
Lesson 3: The Inner Circle and the Inner Heroes
Learn to map and observe your heroes by understanding their mode of influencing your creative practice.
After reflecting upon the experienced difference between being creatively and aggressively influenced, we will map your desired learning environment and will extract your most meaningful creative relationships as sources of living courage and experienced wisdom.
Lesson 4: Translation: From a Beloved Artwork to a Design Instrument
Learn how to integrate your passions (voices of influence) directly into your design practice.
Through concrete design processes, Dr. Bogdanova discusses how recognizing and simultaneously translating the objective existing values of the place of research into an alternative reality (design proposal), does not exclude or contradict the subjective and personal lines of fascination.
The personal and the poetic are explored as experiential modalities of learning how to “bear the intimacy of scrutiny, and to flourish within it”; learning how to “use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living,” making the “fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us” (Lorde, 1977).
Lesson 5: Vizualizing Movement In Architectural Design
In this lesson, you will learn how to manifest the movement of the inhabitants of a specific place, through personalized varieties of the instrument cinematic storyboard.
We will be storytelling a walk through frames and sequences of human perspectives, aiming to understand the human experience of few different personalities, in an existing place or in an imagined scenario.
Lesson 6: Slow Poem-Drawing: A Trans-Temporal Multilogue
The slow drawing experience will teach you to listen more attentively to the voices coming from different fragments of time-space, layered over the particular location.
Moreover, it will teach you to learn how to evaluate and extract meaningful narratives from these voices, interpreting them into your own personal way of understanding.
Lesson 7: The Real Inhabitants
In this lesson, you will go through the practical manual on how to construct an architectural interview.
Architectural interviews will teach you depth reading and interpretation of reality, tracing the experienced spatial values and needs of the inhabitants, while exploring ways of translating this knowledge into a design-oriented perspective.
Lesson 8: The Next Quarter
This lesson aims to stimulate a re-visiting of your heartfelt goals, while researching the path and the obstacle on the way to their achievement.
While transforming your obstacle into a creative challenge, Dr. Bogdanova will help you to pragmatically and consciously synchronize your inner journey with the life of your creative practice.
Lesson 9: The Self Box
The aim of the Self Box exercise is to explore yourself through the different planes, forms of folding and openings of a single Box.
A conscious understanding of the relationships between your inner secret self, your outer self through which you communicate with the environment, and your openings - transitions between who you truly are and how you present yourself to the world, will help you to authentically communicate your values with your creative community.
Lesson 10: Writing Your Statement of Belief
Writing the first draft of your own manifesto will help you to verbalize your own values and principles of creativity, a temporary summary of what do you find meaningful, valuable and beautiful in a creative work.
This first draft of your manifesto is your personal form of resistance.
Its regular upgrading will gradually teach you how to be true to oneself, how to communicate what is meaningful and how to transfer that meaningful to other-crucial companions on your research path.
Concluding Lesson. Exhibiting Reflections
The concluding session would offer you the participation in a verbal and visual retrospective of your individual process on this journey, while witnessing the experiences of the other members of the Archi Contemplatives Community.
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Still unsure to dive in?
📝 🎨 😊
Maybe These Impressions Will Help You Decide...
Viktorija Vitanova
"Between the physical form and the experience, the emotions and the mind, the present and one’s present. Somewhere in between, the poem drawing finds place. A medium of underestimated easiness and clarity amid complexity.
A simple “why not poems for each of them?” shined a new light on the understanding of what the project was all about. Each follow-up confusion, each “stuck in my mind” and “don’t know how” from my side, was met with calmness and patient guidance by the other side.
Viktorija’s approach seems easy and effortless to be led by. Dialog, drawing, and occasional poems as a not so common medium to everyone were introduced as scriptures of one’s thoughts, and then they became habitual.
The answers are never served on a platter, the sole interaction leads the mentees to get to them on their own, to find their voice and vision and imprint it on the project. A unique form of contemplating architecture."
Monika Kodžovašieva
"I had the pleasure to meet Viktorija as a person and a mentor in a period when my life was filled with turbulence and insecurity. In the transition between adolescence and adulthood, I found my self in an egomaniacal environment with “rectilinear” perspectives. I was fighting with all my strengths to cultivate my love for design and my creativity. I was fighting for my right to belong in this completely new world.
Thanks to Viktorija and her guidance, I discovered a new human-centered way of creating, a specific humbleness and silent love for architectural design. I felt that I belonged somewhere for the first time.
She revived my desire for inner growth. She built me a safe place to develop my ideas in my own way, regardless of their unconventionality. She leaded me in a way not too understandable for me at that time, but a way necessary to awaken my inner bloom.
I am grateful for the humanity and the patience she radiated in her teaching, for her constructively beautiful and encouraging words on my work, and for her mentoring that I will hold as one of my dearest memories from my architectural studies."
