private and ideological time|burden

Durational performance

by Viktoria Nikolova and Boyan Avramov

Curator: Ivo Ivanov

Sofia Underground Performance Art Festival 2023

April 28th, 2023 | "Krasno Selo" Municipal Home of Culture, Sofia, Bulgaria

Listening, watching, remembering, ironing. Where is the barrier between the private and ideological time we are nostalgic for? What burden does the experienced time bring us?

I sew and iron to remember something I haven't experienced. A political regime that finds me, no matter how far I am from Bulgaria. The nostalgia for it permeates media, art, politics, culture, and personal stories that seep into everything I do. This is an attempt at a momentary, collective recollection of a personal and ideological past, present and future burden. Elevation. Ascension.

In search of the points of contact between domestic and sacred rituals and their meaning in private and public spaces, we ask ourselves the questions:

How does non-occurrence in personal and everyday time before 1989 carry over time as a burden, and in what form? 

How has this ideology canned the harvest of the minds of thousands of children and rustled unnoticed, occupying space on the back shelves of consciousness? What "copy of a new reality" does the dispute of the ideological regime creates, and how does it transfer to the generation born after 1989 and onwards?

In search of identity, we, the children of transition, return to the painfully familiar practices with which we most strongly identify with this period, and we invite you to listen with us, to remember, to think, and share. A nostalgic attempt to connect the past of an entire generation with the presence of a new one, which aims at a transliteral/audio translation of deep-rooted memories.