We make immersive art installations, mostly with light and often at a large scale. But we are not interested in making images of worlds. We want to build the worlds themselves — real places with weight, light, silence, weather, bodies, presence. Before EMPATIA, we spent more than twenty years in technology, advertising, production, urban art, cultural strategy, and destination development. Wherever we worked, we tried to leave things changed — bigger, clearer, more alive. But at some point, the old world stopped making sense. We had spent too much time helping sell things we no longer believed in. So we took the essence of everything we had learned and turned fully toward light, art, and meaning.

EMPATIA is called EMPATIA because empathy is how we work. Not empathy as a soft decorative word, but in its real sense: the ability to read a place, a silence, a tension, a hidden emotional layer, a sign that is not obvious yet. We create worlds as rituals — places where people can step out of the noise and feel connected to something larger than themselves. To beauty, to the whole, to the source, to God, or to whatever name they give to the sacred. We do not think this comes only from us. At its best, it comes through us.

That is why we keep doing this, even when it is almost impossibly hard. Not because something looks good in a picture. Not because it is impressive, although sometimes it is. We do it for the moment when people enter the work and something in them softens, opens, remembers. Children feel it. Adults feel it. People we never expected to reach feel it. Sometimes they leave with tears in their eyes. Sometimes they hug us and simply say thank you. That is the real work. Our art is not decoration. It is a form of speaking, maybe even a form of prayer — a way to make real things that help the world feel a little less empty.

We are Kalina and Iasen. We are based in Sofia, Bulgaria.