Antropospaces II. El Olvido, 2005

Year 2005, Bulgaria. The buildings are stripped down to their ugly lack of purpose. The fields are empty and the buss stops, covered with aging election propaganda are even emptier, solid and resistant to disappearance.

I am exhilarated. I have a mulberry in my hand and the taste of happiness in my mouth. I walk through endless rows of concrete housing buildings, gray and dirty as their surrounding industries, the grass and trees, grown absolutely out of control are taking over an apocalyptic science fiction field. I am looking for a red pioneer scarf.

The projection of the future on facts from the past.
Uncertainty / oblivion / fear.
The shaping of perception in a highly mutable environment.
Leftovers from the totalitarian past re-interpreted and used as a trigger for absurd situations.

The material I shot during a one month trip around Bulgaria became the documentary base for this series of photographs–almost real, and very personal. In many cases I staged situations recalling facts or circumstances, stressing on forgotten obsessions, fears and contradictions.
I worked with a particular architecture from the totalitarian times in Bulgaria and the inhabitants of this country in recent years – after the fall of the Berlin Wall. More precisely, the buildings and spaces, which construction started before 89 and were never completed or demolished, and on the other hand – the young born after this date, who live under the powerful physical influence of this monsters, monuments of a completely denied past, without having any apparent awareness of, or relationship to them.

I am interested in the imposition of desires and behavior structures in the void created by the denial of previous impositions. And how this “denial” is created. I look into this issue using the physical relationship (real, invented/staged, or manipulated) between the inhabitants of this bizarre word they don’t belong to, and this same word, obsolete and folded inwards, but incredibly present and visible.
The underlying thread for this project are the relationships and boundaries between the Bulgarian society I remember from my childhood, and the one in creation after 89, which I barely know. I approached them subjectively, digging hidden layers of delusion, emotions, and missing links.