Who have we been is an exploration of a traumatic early childhood memory in five parts: two audio stories, four paintings, a sculpture you get into to listen to a piece of music, and a video. It was created on the occasion of being nominated for the Baza award for contemporary art.
Baza award exhibition at Sofia city art gallery, July 22 - August 18 2019
curator Daniela Radeva
The memory is about a kindergarten carer who used (the threat of) making us undress in front of everyone as a way of disciplining us.
A few years ago I discover a forgotten memory from kindergarten that appeared in my head after a panic attack. Maybe for the first time I'm ready to face it? Even now it’s incomplete. It looks like an old shrapnel - a fragment of a crash that happened some place else. In this fragment of a memory I find a form of humiliation so strong that it is capable of dividing the personality in two. For more than a year I explore it – I make drawings related to the magnetism of a terrible memory. It takes me 13 months to tell it for the first time, and that’s how I realize that language plays an important part here, because it‘s difficult to speak almost to the point of being unbearable. Then I meet with other people who have witnessed the events, people who have been kids like I have been in those years. I talk to them. I try to get closer to the place of the memory, the kindergarten itself, and make a recording, but I never make it there, something stops me. Eventually I record on the pavement on the other side of the street. I make a video about another person’s memories of the event and about trying to fix things long past. I think about “broilki” – Bulgarian child’s poems, counting rhymes of the type of “eeny, meeny, miny, moe”, but in the local tradition for centuries they have been full of explicit violence, prejudice, blood, obscure sexuality, anger and threat.* I went under the table to look for the memories there - I had once heard that one can remember forgotten dreams and other escaped recollections in small spaces. The magnetic power of this memory? It is unfinished, but also - it speaks about the darkness of childhood.
There is no other moment in our life that we are like an open ear - completely defenceless to the point that even words can hurt us. An ear cannot choose to close off.
In part I of this project, there is a recording, made near the kindergarten, of the memory as it happened. The recording' is to be listened in the corner of the room, as if the viewer is a grounded child.
In part II, there is a recording of old childhood counting rhymes. It’s to be listened closer to the ground, while crouching. Or if the viewer is a child, that should be the ideal height for them.
In part III, there are 4 abstract paintings on the wall.
In part IV, there is a recording of a piece by Alexander Kyd, These waters remember, which is to be listened with headphones on, while the viewer needs to go under a table with a glass table-top to access the headphones.
In part V, there is a video exploring another person’s memories of the events - a friend from kindergarten who has a completely different recollection than mine.
Video still
* A direct translation to some of them:
My mum scolded me for a cigarette. My dad married Geni the pig – and little piggies with pink asses were born.
A stone fell down from the sky, it hit Goshko on the belly, how much blood ran out, how much pus ran out, who was “it” – first “it” was him!
A bear shat on a path – who ate it, was it you?
Charlie Chaplin got hammered, he drank a hundred bottles of rum, he didn’t pay the bartender, he went home and punched his wife; she gave birth to his children, he ate them like fried eggs.