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It hit me like it hit you. Our fist Covid 19 lockdown in 2020. The fear of the unknown, the lack of control, the loss of freedom. The feeling of the fragility of human species was overwhelming. A new natural order was in place and we had to create new communication codes. All was pressing us to another mode of thinking. I spent my days remembering who I was and what I loved about life. I made a fried over FB and spend many hours laughing with him. This body of work was our gesture to one another – we would take one photograph each day and send it. The instant film gave me the physical feeling I was missing, while my live was making its virtual transitioning.
I bought the green dress but never wore it, yet I took it in my suitcase everywhere I went. I needed a reason to put it on, but it never came and I was coming to accept its silent company… It started with an oil painting, a piano and three of us in an apartment in the center of Sofia… a long time ago… I posed for a portrait, wearing my green dress for the very first time and listened to him on the grand piano in the middle of the living room… In a lifetime, we meet people who mark us. They become our friends, lovers, enemies and sometimes remain… as strangers who have touched us in a way, we remember them always. I know that day I wanted to remember forever. I parted with the green dress because it became the embodiment of feelings past and feelings to come – a sentiment that stays, despite the traces time leaves. I believe the green dress came to be a message, words unsaid and incomprehensible, a note beyond time and space – I would write as I went through the days… as they came.
This is a story about the small community of Bogolin, one of the few (Islamic) Pomak villages in the southwest of Bulgaria. I photographed people who are clung to their traditions because they have been forced to, and I photographed how the West is slowly infiltrating even those godforsaken places where people still have to produce themselves all they consume. I photographed the spirit of its culture and the shadow of nostalgia and sense of loss that hovers over every generation that witnesses significant social changes.
They live like nomads on a small unregulated plot in Sofia, which used to be agricultural land in the near past. They live in temporary sheds under the constant fear of eviction. They are filthy, uneducated, and unwanted. They are Roma. This body of work begun under the bigger subject of CONFLICT by the FOTOFABRIKA festival in 2016 and it remained an ongoing project for me since then. It opens an awkward conversation about the marginal life in a Roma neighborhood, where the ideal meets reality, culture meets culture and desire meets the unknown.
I didn’t fully understand what I was beginning to do when I planned this project. In time, I came to realize that I was looking for personal answers in the truths about a system I hardly knew. I remember I was only but twelve when the Wall fell. And so it happened I was reconstructing a time which nobody, not even our closest relatives, talked about… not even today. Perhaps I was discovering old truths for others but for me, they were sudden revelations. I can now imagine how living in the inescapable conditions of the totalitarian state, no individual could keep his sovereignty and wholeness, no matter how carefully he would have kept his deepest secrets. In such a life, all internal boundaries are broken and the only border-left is the national border.
In different political environments and times, borders embody different meanings. Until 1989 Bulgaria was defending the external border in agreement with the Warsaw Pact In 2007, that border marked the new edge of the European Union.
I am here. You can deny me, with your zeros and ones eyes, not able to look beyond the framework of your own life and world. But I am still here. I may not look the way you want me to look, you want the world to look, with clarity and easily fileable words. Man. Woman. Strong. Weak. Gay. Straight. Good. Bad. The world is a place of complexity, chaos, greyscales, and noise. To make sense of this world humans invented gods, rituals, codes, norms, and rules to make sense. To get a grip. Not knowing what would get lost by doing that. The noise, the infinite greys, the beauty… But the world isn’t having it. Slowly, but steadfast, without hesitation, it shows us what is lost. What we can gain. The spaces between, the confusion, the not-knowing, the openness, the transparency, the freedom…
GLAS Foundation presents its first book “People with Voices”, which collects the stories of 37 public figures who openly support the rights of the LGBTI community in Bulgaria.
In 2017, the houses of the Roma community – the largest ethnic minority in Bulgaria – living on Gradinite Street in the Orlandovtsi neighborhood in Sofia, were destroyed, automatically making at least 50 people, 30 of them children, homeless.
35 of the people, whose homes were destroyed, took part in our art action in July 2019. Giant posters with their portraits were printed and placed in the ruins of their homes and shot from above.
Art action and video produced by: Fine Acts Photography by Vesselina Nikolaeva Camera by Marin Kafedjiiski, Twin Pickles Music by Escape Pod Party
English edition Hard cover Leporelo 4,5 meter 16 colour photographs 21 archive photographs, 5 maps Photography by Vesselina Nikolaeva Text by Vesselina Nikolaeva Designby Piet Gerards Ontwerpers This book is a zine publication.
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