Martin Tomov and Maria Ilieva explore human and non-human perspectives as a continuation of the artistic project "Beyond the History of Slavic-Bulgarian," created for Nine Elephants in 2024. Here, they build upon the perspective of the ontological turn through the concept of infrastructural poetics, which directs attention toward understanding the local context, including non-human ontologies. From this point onward, they focus their research specifically on four 'infrastructural topos.'
I. Introduction
Let's imagine that we are standing on Blvd. "Istoriya Slavyanobulgarska" (its name literally translated as Slavic-Bulgarian History) years after the age of humankind. What human and more-than-human perspectives could this boulevard reveal to us, a boulevard woven into multiple historical and transformative periods, as well as signs of decay, corruption, oligarchy and post-totalitarian history, yet also by some strange and unexpected hope? What traces of a destroyed planet and stories of interspecies entanglement and collective sustainability can we uncoverin Sofia?
With such questions in mind we started the development of the project "Beyond "Slavic-Bulgarian History", with which we participated in the micro-festival “Nine Elephants" in 2024. Our ideas in this project were inspired by the works of Anna Tsing, as well as by the theoretical aspects of the Ontological Turn and infrastructural poetics. Through artistic research and a deep engagement with the urban fabric of four locations of the urban environment, which are connected (and separated) by this boulevard, we managed to create an audiovisual document about the perspectives of that, which would remain in Sofia long after the age of humanity.
The present text is an attempt present the discourse on this question and examine in greater depth its theoretical foundations. The theoretical question that concerned us throughout the research was precisely how could we imagine a multispecies perspective, including human and more-than-human narratives, while simultaneously taking into account specific urban and cultural issues. In other words, how can we think of a conceptual apparatus that includes the narratives of a transforming planet, while at the same time considering the extremely local phenomena and dynamics.
In this text we will first take into account some of the foundations of the Ontological Turn in question in the social sciences and humanities as well as its relation to the concept of the Anthropocene. To reach our main theoretical question, we will look into two examples of the Anthropocene in Bulgaria. These are the lesser-known sanctuaries of marine life - the ostraci in the Black Sea, as well as the ecosystem, historical and industrial entanglements surrounding the Rozov Kladenets dam. In order to build on the perspective of the Оntological Тurn, we will clarify the notion of infrastructural poetics, which will lead us to a closer understanding of the local context, also including more-than-human ontologies. Having examined the theoretical aspects in detail, we will turn to the core of our artistic research. These are four points to which we will attach the concept of infrastructural topoi. Namely, these points are Nadezhda Park (literally translates to Hope Park) and its outskirts, the abandoned Nikola Korchev Railway Transport High School, the Sofia Power Plant and the Central Sofia Cemetery Park. Beyond the humorous journey from hope, through the abandoned school and polluting stream to the cemetery, these infrastructural topoi bring together multiple transformations and thematize multispecies ontologies. These are places created for people, but gradually overtaken by other beings - moss, mold, shrubs, animals. During the implementation of the project, we managed to conduct a thorough investigation of the points in question around Sofia, which revealed to us many intriguing stories about post-totalitarian heritage, corruption, frauds and political changes.
II. Anthropocene and the Ontological Turn
In the year 2000 the concept of Anthropocene gained popularity for the first time. It refers to the impact that human activities have on the Earth and atmosphere, such as sulfur dioxide emissions doubling its amount due to coal usage, increased levels of nitrogen oxide due to the use of fossil fuels and fertilizers, climate change caused by the warming of the atmosphere, changes in the ozone layer, the loss of biodiversity, as well as changes in sedimentary layers. The transformation in the structure of life and living conditions on Earth is also visible in the glacial ice cores, where the increase of greenhouse gases has been evident since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (Crutzen, P. et al. 2000. 484, 485). Along with this, the concept of the Anthropocene directs attention to the geological stock of fossils, where it is very clearly visible that the last 200 to 300 years have seen species extinctions comparable only to the end of other geological epochs (Williams et al. 2022). Species extinctions and atmospheric warming are happening at such a rapid rate and on such a scale that it is impossible not to notice some sort of catastrophic event that affects life on the planet, even if we look only at the geological data. Today, we live in the so-called Sixth Mass Extinction of species, caused by human pressure. It is occuring between 100 and 1000 times faster than it would without anthropogenic presence. From 1970 to 2020 there has been a loss of 78% of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish population.
The Anthropocene raises the question of whether we can speak of a new geological epoch in which human influence is essential for the changes taking place on Earth. Proposals for the beginning of this geological event range from the invention of the greenhouse engine in the 18th century to the first atomic bomb tests in the 20th century, when radioactive isotopes left their marks on the Earth's layers (Subramanian 2019). Whatever the case might be, it points to the fact that, far after humankind, the remains of the changes which have taken place on the earth will bear the mark of human presence.
In the realm of the social sciences, the concept of the Anthropocene is united with the development of the so-called Ontological Turn by breaking down the nature-culture opposition that is otherwise typical of modern Western societies. Furthermore, it also recognizes the "self-organizing capacities of life" in the mechanistic and reductionist discourses of scientific knowledge. Anthropocene theories give space to so-called multispecies ethnography, in which the interrelationships between various non-human beings such as plants, animals, soils and landscapes are observed. This kind of worldview recognizes the colonial experience of multiple cultures, as well as the relationship of colonialism to "dispossession, genocide, ecological domination, and environmental transformation." (Mathews 2020 70, 71).
Faced with inevitable ecological catastrophes, anthropology and the social sciences began to recognize human relationships with "that which is other than human." The Ontological Turn in anthropology is defined as "the study of reality" as we see it through the interrelationships of human and non-human (or beyond-human) beings [1], which are not reduced solely to a linguistic or symbolic representation of language, but rather refer to the "relationship of language to non-language" and an interspecies intertwining that "ecologizes" (Kohn, E. 312) reality, appearing through a multiplicity of diverse perspectives. Ontology here refers to the study of reality, encompassing both human worlds and various forms of existence, including non-human beings. It is not just people who create and interpret knowledge and signs, but the world - as it is - and other actors in it create knowledge, act, tell narratives, and develop. That which possesses agency is constructed through an interrelation of human and non-human beings, which in turn construct a kind of multiperspective entanglement.
Despite the lack of strong commitment to the concept of the Anthropocene in Bulgarian context, Anna Antonova shows that the field of humanitarian studies addressing human-nature relationship is growing in popularity. Antonova draws attention to the importance that environmental research has for political and social transformations in the country - with examples from the first democratic protests in the late 1980s to the most recent significant political unrest of the 2020s, in which the topic of the environment proves to be, if not key, at least crucial to the formation of new discourses and narratives in favor of progressive social change (Antonova, A. 2023). All this shows us the exceptional potential that the subject has for development in the Bulgarian context.
In the context of the research we conducted on Blvd. "Slavic Bulgarian History" the most relevant theories proved to be those of Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing. They work in the field of the ontological turn and manage to give a comprehensive theoretical and practical dimension to the discourses on the Anthropocene through a critical attitude towards the concept. Haraway criticizes discourses of the Anthropocene as those which, although they point to the interconnectedness of human and non-human beings, they rather apply accusatory narratives to humanity - which is understood as a whole, rather than as a dynamic society with varying levels of involvement and culpability. For her, these theories fail to recognize the inequalities created by colonialism, capitalism and industrialization that unevenly affect different groups and contribute to uneven practical responsibility for environmental destruction (Haraway 2016 48). Haraway recognizes in the use of the Anthropocene rather deterministic and apocalyptic attitudes that do not predispose to response and action during a crisis. As an alternative way of seeing, she articulates the Chthulucene as a concept that predisposes to looking deeply into and "staying with" the conditions of a transforming planet (101). The Chthulucene emphasizes symbiosis, interdependence, and kinship as the basis for the coexistence of species on the planet.
Like Haraway, Tsing looks at “the art of living on a damagedplanet” (Tsing et al. 2017) to highlight the resilience of life in ruined worlds and industrial ruins that host multiple multispecies entanglements and adaptations. Tsing's works explore how life - human and non-human - exists, adapts and creates new possibilities in a world deeply affected by environmental and social crises. In her book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins Tsing views the matsutake mushroom—a highly prized, wild, and impossible-to-cultivate mushroom—as a lens for exploring global supply chains, interactions between humans and non-human beings, and the possibilities of survival in the Anthropocene. Tsing draws attention to the ways the mushroom’s activity manifests in the world - its terrifying aroma, its ability to grow in ruined places, the impossibility of being industrially cultivated, and the high difficulty of its discovery in nature.
The matsutake is an organism that grows mostly in pine forests destroyed by industrial logging. After these heavy machines pass through the forests, only emptiness remains. However, the matsutake mushroom managed to find a way to grow precisely in these areas completely degraded by the industry. It becomes the main inhabitant of the industrial ruins and attracts around itself all kinds of human practices. Tsing combines ethnography, ecology, and economic criticism to understand how life continues in the fields and landscapes destroyed by capitalism and industrialization. The matsutake mushroom escapes the possibility of industrial control, as it is practically impossible to cultivate or grow industrially.
Tsing shows us what she would later call a patchy Anthropocene (Tsing et al. 2019), which consists of “patchy landscapes, multiple temporalities, and shifting assemblages of humans and nonhumans: the very stuʃ of collaborative survival” (Tsing 2015 20). She traces the global trade in matsutake, from the forests of Japan, the United States and China to luxury markets around the world. This supply chain highlights the inequalities and insecurities of global capitalism, where marginalized workers and traders sustain an economy built on a system that excludes them and is based on ecological destruction (115). The seemingly structured and stable economic system depends on the precarious and unregulated labor of workers who remain in the periphery of the social and economic order. Tsing insists on recognizing these entanglements, between human and more-than-human creatures, which reveal what is happening on an already destroyed planet during the time of the Anthropocene.
III. Illustrations in the Bulgarian context
* Ostraci
The Anthropocene is not just a time frame or a scientific concept - it is a way to rethink the relationships between people, nature and economic systems. In the Bulgarian context, this concept acquires a specific form when we look at it through certain examples that reveal the interdependencies between local and global processes. Before entering the conceptual debates about the ontological turn and the urban context of Sofia, we will dwell on two lesser-known cases that illustrate how the Anthropocene manifests itself closer to our local ontologies.
The first example comes from the waters of the Black Sea. One of the rarest habitats can be found here, exclusive to the waters of the Black Sea, but nevertheless remaining unknown. Biogenic oyster reefs, also called ostaci, are the remains of a past life narrative of transformation and the self-organizing ability of life, that defines interspecies entanglement. During the last century, the flat oyster (Ostrea edulis) flourished in the waters of the Black Sea, but due to the accumulating ecological change and many new pressures related to human activities, today oysters have become so rare, that marine biologists are unable to observe them in the wild, making them practically a critically endangered or nearly extinct species in the Black Sea. Such destructive types of pressures on the Black Sea ecosystem are for example, climate change, which rapidly warms sea waters; eutrophication, which is a natural process of phytoplankton blooms that occurs due to the excessive use of fertilizers and thus suffocating aquatic life; the destruction and practical plowing of the seabed, due to the use of environmentally harmful fishing methods that scrape their nets on the seabed (trawling) and the introduction of invasive species such as rapana, a genus of large predatory sea snails, that have no natural enemies in the sea and quickly destroy the rest of the molluscs. Today, however, despite the almost complete destruction of the flat oyster, this species continues to give life beyond its own.
The shells of the now extinct oysters gradually adhere to each other and over time create huge biogenic reefs on the seafloor. The shells that once housed live oysters today serve as home to a variety of sea creatures, from crabs and small fish to algae and fungi. They are practically unique havens for marine life. Biogenic reefs of this size and height are found mainly in the Maslen Nos region and are considered to be formations that can only be found in the Black Sea (Todorova et al. 2009). Locally referred to as ostraci, these structures of inter-species entanglement exemplify what Donna Haraway calls the Chthulucene - an expression of an inter-species symbiosis that changes the world, and simultaneously, is changed through relationships of decomposition (composting) and building new human and more-than-human relationships. These days, these ostraci have become a new attraction for local divers, who often lead diving groups to these marine sanctuaries. The ostraci challenge us to rethink notions of destruction and restoration, reminding us that even in the ruins of a damaged world there is room for life and connection.
** Rozov Kladenets dam
The next example is related to human-altered zones, which show us both the interweaving of more-than-human and human narratives, and their capacities for adaptation to new living conditions on earth. It serves as a broader illustration of Anna Tsing's theories, but also prompts the critical aspect of the Anthropocene, which we will discuss in the next part.
In the southern part of Bulgaria, in the immediate vicinity of the Marishki Basin, stands the Rozov Kladenets dam. In our history, he appears as an example of the paradoxes of the Anthropocene. Built during the country’s Soviet regime between 1957 and 1960, it was created to supply water to the three power plants from the Maritsa-Iztok complex, as well as cooling the waste water of the Brickell thermal power plant. Since its main function today is precisely the latter (cooling of industrial waters from the coal-fired Brickell TPP), it turns out that the waters of this dam maintain a relatively constant temperature throughout the year - even in winter they do not freeze, unlike most water basins in the region. This makes the Pink Well an exceptional habitat for many important bird species, especially those that migrate in winter. 142 species of birds have been found there, of which 34 are included in the Red Book of Bulgaria. However, migration through this territory is not solely natural instinct– birds migrate there not only because of climate rhythms, but also in response to human intervention; the possibility of migratory movement and refuge in unfrozen waters occurs in the context of the Anthropocene, where human activity has redefined the path these birds take. Although the warm dam provides refuge and respite for the birds, and is even used to release injured and healed birds back into the wild, power plants like Brickell are among the strongest contributors to bird mortality globally (Benjamin, K. 2012) and contribute to global climate change due to their use of coal. The period of the Anthropocene manifests itself precisely in these contradictions - a place that is both an ecological crisis and a system of entanglements; human-disturbed industrial zones and landscapes become entwined in a complex web of more-than-human narratives.
But there is more to this story. The Brickell thermal power plant, which is precisely the reason for the warming of the waters, has another history. In fact, this power plant is one of the most polluting in the country, and is notorious for corruption schemes. Over the years, the Brickell TPP systematically pollutes the air and the environment in the area, mostly with regularly elevated levels of sulfur dioxide, and locals keep reporting piles of black dust flooding every aspect of their daily lives. The power plant systematically violates all norms of pollution with fine dust particles and sulphur dioxide - constantly poisoning the inhabitants of this area [2]. In addition, environmental organizations reveal that this plant consistently understates the figures indicated in its reports, thereby masking an unreported total of 1,957,682 tons of carbon dioxide and avoiding carbon fines amounting to more than 146 million BGN. In addition to these violations, the plant became known for the illegal import and burning of Italian waste. The Brickell TPP is connected to the businessman, famous for unimaginable corruption schemes, Hristo Kovacki. According to the reports, Brickell is part of the illegal empire of Kovacki, who privatized a large part of the country's energetics sector through offshore companies and thus runs the industry utilizing countless harmful practices, human rights violations and crimes against nature. Even without reference to the Nine Elephants micro-festival, the corruption schemes associated with Kovacki are named „the elephant in the room“
The dam and its adjacent Brickell Thermal Power Plant tell a story of poisonous air, social inequalities and corruption that shape the lives of local communities. In the future, when coal is a thing of the past and the Brickell TPP has closed its doors, the dam will continue to witness these relationships. In fact, the Rozov Kladenets dam reveals more than interspecies entanglements - it also showcases the ways in which we can develop the theoretical apparatus of the ontological turn to unveil something more.
IV. Infrastructural poetics
And it is precisely this practical example that reveals to us the problem with which we started: how to use the theoretical framework of the ontological turn simultaneously to recognize the interspecies interconnectedness and multiple perspectives that construct human and more-than-human realities, while at the same time addressing specific sociocultural dimensions of inequalities and recognizing historical dynamics. How can the Anthropocene, this planetary event that divulges multiple life forces present on a ruined planet, that cannot be told without taking into account more-than-human perspectives, serve as a critical engagement with local realities?
The example of Rozov Kladenets leads us to criticisms leveled at the ontological turn. The conceptual apparatus of the ontological turn serves to engage with climate and ecological processes and also broadens perspectives by decentering anthropocentrism and embracing multispecies and pluralistic worldviews (O'Reilly, J. et al. 2020 15). However, it is also criticized for often neglecting the concrete causes of environmental catastrophes and climate change, as well as being too abstract, which distances theory from practical solutions (23). Additionally, David Graeber notes first that the Ontological Turn can treat indigenous local beliefs and practices as isolated realities, which he argues risks creating artificial boundaries, reinforcing Western-centric epistemologies; and second, that it rarely engages with concepts that already well explain established social and cultural problems (Graeber 2015). Another field of criticism comes from proponents of the notion of the Capitalocene as opposed to the Anthropocene, for whom the Anthropocene ignores the economic and class inequalities that precisely predispose to a world of broken planet (Февзи, Ф. 2020). All these critical views of the Anthropocene and the ontological turn do not reject the conceptual apparatus in question, on the contrary, they see it as valuable, but require a new inclusion. It is the need for this inclusion that also reveals to us the Rozov Kladenets Dam, where interspecies and more-than-human narratives are tied to multiple local dynamics of corruption and infrastructural decay.
This is where infrastructural poetics come into play. Brian Larkin urges us to consider infrastructure not only in its physical dimensions, but instead to approach it as networks and flows. For him, infrastructure - roads, bridges, power lines and pipelines - is not only the physical basis of modern society, but also an expression of the social, political and environmental relations that shape the world. The way infrastructure frames space and time affects our experience of the world and holds the potential to rethink relationships with places, mobility and connectivity. For Larkin, the so-called "ontology of infrastructure" presents infrastructure as physical and technical, while simultaneously representing different relationships and realities. The idea that infrastructure exists apart from its technical or physical reality also creates the possible conditions under which other objects (and subjects) exist and are categorized (Larkin 2013 329). It is not a set of objects, but a network of relationships that enable other systems to function.
Roads, pipelines and cables are not just physical artefacts, they shape and mediate social interactions and economic flow. In this way, infrastructural objects create opportunities for sensory, imaginative and mental experiences (movement, lights, heat and noise), which construct the ways in which people can experience and inhabit certain spaces. Larkin draws on the concepts of Aristotle and Jacques Rancière to define poetics (through the ancient Greek aisthesis) as creating a bodily and "produce the ambient conditions of everyday life: our sense of temperature, speed, florescence, and the ideas we have associated with 336 Larkin these conditions” (336-337). Infrastructural objects serve as a sign of political and historical time in spatial environments, but also create an "sensory apprehension of existence." (338) Larkin identifies the poetic as the quality of infrastructure to evoke desires, experiences, fantasies, and cultural representations. Infrastructures organize populations and spaces, thereby strengthening state or corporate power.
Often, infrastructures are built to create a desire for a certain conceptual paradigm of modernity, such as the hundreds of kilometers of Albanian roads built during the Soviet regime, despite the authoritarian state's practical ban on the use of cars, resulting in an "infrastructural fetishism" (333). Larkin is also familiar with the Bulgarian researcher Vladislav Todorov, who studies the "aesthetic" structures of the Soviet regime, which do not create goods, but "symbolic meanings" that represent the administrative power of the regime (Todorov, V. 2013 335). Another example would be the energy transition in the western side of Rotterdam, where the new infrastructure of pipes, cables and new buildings is recognized as a sign of a certain type of citizenship that residents must aspire to in order to continue to be part of the respective neighborhood, while at the same time predisposing (managing) the locals to a particular type of temporality or spending of time that is more related to market practices than to the creation of mutual aid communities (Tomov, M. 2022).
Larkin challenges us to see infrastructural objects, flows and networks as more than technical givens. We should see them as cultural artifacts to be explored in their dynamics. This allows an additional look at how transformative processes of the Anthropocene reveal local perspectives of infrastructural poetics and interspecies narratives.
V. Infrastructural topos and Beyond "Slavic-Bulgarian History"
Subject and place
Here we arrive at the basis of our practical task. In this chapter, we will reveal one aspect of the history of the Anthropocene in Sofia, but for a comprehensive reading of our artistic research it is best to review the audio-visual document "Beyond "Slavic Bulgarian History". In this part, we will focus more on infrastructural dependencies and narratives of corruption, transformation and decay. It is exactly in the cracks of these infrastructural worlds that we find the space of more-than-human beings. These are spaces that manage to unite place and subject.
Our artistic research took us to Blvd. "Slavic-Bulgarian History" - a boulevard that reveals a liminal space, present as an invisible transitional border between center and periphery. There we focused on the four points of the metropolitan field, which for us unite space and subject - these are Nadezhda Park and its periphery, the abandoned Nikola Korchev Railway Transport Vocational High School, the central building of the Sofia Thermal Power Plant and the Central Sofia Cemetery Park. These four points standing side by side reveal the fluctuating opposition between inhabited and uninhabited spaces. Sofia is filled with such liminal spaces, which are defined as transitory, but illustrate the converging currents of ontological and social opposition. At the same time, these places are subject to current or future transformations and are embedded in political discourses. These are the contours of the urban space that speak for themselves - they construct narratives of streams of infrastructural poetics and more-than-human worlds that speak of transience and transformation as well as decay and new life. While the park and school hold transformation and otherworlds, the “Sofia” TPP and the Cemetery Park reveal stories of corruption, decay and interspecies entanglement.
*Nadezhda Park
Nadezhda Park and its periphery are extremely indicative of the political and urban transformation in Sofia. To phrase it as Tsing would - it personifies the tension between temporality and scaling - scalability (Tsing 2015 38) - in the development of the urban environment. The history of the Nadezhda park and area is linked to political transformations; it embodies material structures that create social and political imaginaries. Since its inception, the Nadezhda neighborhood has been presented as a vision for a brighter future. Its very name "Hope" reinforces its symbolic weight in narratives of transformation. When in 1972 a plan for the development of the Nadezhda area is presented, it is hailed as a good decision "in the spirit of the most modern notions of mass residential culture.'' Existing houses have been removed from the so-called "former suburbs" and replaced with "prefabricated constructions of eight-storey blocks."
Political attention to the park always increases during local election campaigns. For example in 2019 another new renovation was underway, including new lighting and parking to coincide with the local elections. And in 2023 further improvements, such as the renovation of paths and the reconstruction of a bridge 'connecting' the park to the housing blocks, are presented as building a narrative of „good governance“. This repeated framing and reinterpretation of the neighborhood and the park turns them into a perpetual place of potential rather than a finished space—a place of never-finished hope. Today, this area, as well as those adjacent to Nadezhda Park, are the result of new investment projects for residential complexes, motivated by the construction of a metro station and constant renovations.
While the central areas of the park are highlighted in public and political discourse, its periphery tells a different story. The end of this never-ending hope and the border of the park is the canal of the Suhodol River, where unexpected ecologies and neglected spaces are revealed. There, (non)human environments meet the gradual decline of infrastructure, which resists planned transformations and shows us encounters with multiple interspecies connections. On the outskirts of Nadezhda Park, new forms of life flourish: mold, moss, and the remains of trapped animals. One of the most common inhabitants is the dandelion, whose wind-carried seeds colonize industrial wastelands and urban parks. The dandelion reminds us of the resilience of more-than-human beings in the era of the Anthropocene. This species thrives in elevated carbon dioxide levels and easily takes over such urban structures. Another of the species we encounter there - the purple loosestrife - reminds us of the tangled worlds of interspecies dynamics and global species migrations. Native to some parts of Europe and North Africa, it is quickly categorized as invasive when it is introduced to other habitats, such as North America, where it causes huge problems and forms dense monocultures that displace native flora. This species spreads easily in human-altered riverine landscapes. Its presence in riverbeds near Nadezhda Park emphasizes the global dimensions of local ecologies.
Nadezhda Park is more than a physical space. Its political and environmental transformations tell a story of both connection and unification, as well as decay, neglect and new lives. The landscape of the park reveals the complex interplay of investment, decline and sustainability that defines urban life.
** Nikola Korchev Vocational High School of Railway Transport
Nikola Korchev VHSRT follows a similar narrative of constant transformations, but as if mirrored. Built in 1957, the high school was originally named "Georgi Dimitrov". The building was adapted and built on the foundations of warehouses. In this period, high schoolers were recruited "from the locomotive and wagon repair depots in the country" (DA [State Archive] - Sofia, f. 4162) - without having the full story, this reminds us of the many disturbing and sinister practices from the era of the totalitarian Soviet regime that pass under the guise of educational policies.
The name was changed in 1974, when the high school adopted the Bulgarian Revival hero Nikola Korchev as its patron. This revival motif and the transformation in the name are reminiscent of the revival process taking place in this period, when the names of hundreds
thousands of Bulgarian citizens are forcibly replaced. In 2020 the school underwent a new transformation, as according to order RD 14-59/20.07.2020 it had been "transformed" into another school - the Professional High School for Ascentional, Construction and Transport Technology. According to the order, this is an "optimization" process that occurs because of the "need to optimize" (МОН РД14-59/20.07.2020) of the network of vocational high schools, whilst the new high school is assigned operator of the property. These changes are not welcomed by the staff. The VHSRT staff share their feelings about the closure: "In the building of the closed high school, it is quiet, dark, deserted... Only months ago, the cacophony of students could be heard here, it was lively... The spirit was different. It's deathly quiet now. And memories come flooding back...“
Today the building is empty. Next to the abandoned infrastructures, however, we meet another invasive species. Abandoned school grounds and disused tracks are now home to the Japanese Knotweed. Introduced to Europe in the 19th century, the Japanese Knotweed quickly escaped botanical gardens and spread throughout human-altered areas. Its rhizomatic root system easily penetrates cracks in hard surfaces such as concrete and asphalt. This organism grows mostly in urban environments around roads and railways, where it gradually changes the quality of the soil and suppresses the growth of other plants.
The story of the VHSRT Nikola Korchev reveals broader changes in the country's political and economic landscape. Derelict buildings and gradual takeover by invasive species embody layered histories of change and abandonment. The remains of the school building remind us how the infrastructure, although eroded, continues to tell the story of the interweaving of multispecies transformations.
*** Sofia Thermal Power Plant
The Sofia TPP building was built in 1949. It tells a tale of slow decay, oligarchy, generations of corruption and interspecies interconnectedness in the cracks of rotting infrastructure. Originally designed for coal, the plant switched to fossil gas in 1975, and today it consumes a third of the gas used in Bulgaria - exactly the same as the gas consumption of all of Moldova. Beneath the surface lies a crumbling infrastructure, mounting debts and decades-long scandals.
In 2006 the then-owner of the company Valio Toploto (Valio “The Heat”) was arrested on charges of money laundering. Years of contentious management followed, making the headquarters one of the biggest debtors in the country, although the company is proverbial for chasing its own debtors. In 2012 the company accumulated losses in the amount of BGN 397 million, after which it began to operate at a loss to this day (Report No. 408043). Currently, the power plant has a debt of BGN 1.6 billion to BEH and Bulgargas. In 2021, after a comprehensive analysis of the company was carried out, which showed the facilities were extremely old, it became clear it is impossible for the company to be compliant with environmental norms. Its equipment is at or beyond its designated life, and the risk of accidents is extremely high. In the period of 2015 to 2021, 35 employee injuries were registered. Photos from the plant show dilapidated infrastructure, rusted pipes, holes in the walkways on the higher floors. The company's pipelines are often rusty and old, losing an average of 20% of energy annually. The Sofia heating plant constantly violates its complex permit by polluting the air with nitrogen oxide and the waters with metals and sulfate ions (2022, 2023 Annual report KR TPP "Sofia").
Although the company traditionally operates at a loss, in 2021 something unusual happened; it turned out Sofia Heating had a BGN 318 million profit. This happened after the servitudes of the company's pipeline lands, which amount to BGN 585 million, were recognized as intangible assets (Grant Thornton OOD, reports 2022, 2023). In reality, these are the spaces around the many rotting pipes, sliding like true Cthulhu through the urban landscape, which suddenly become an active asset for the plant. Thus, according to the reports, the loss has been written off. The increase in revenue this year was 73%. This corresponds to the state's intention to buy out the company from the Sofia Municipality - a deal that can potentially be carried out only when Sofia Heating is profitable (2022 Annual Report of KR TPP "Sofia"). From 2019 to 2024 the company concludes dubious deals for carbon quotas that damage the finances of the district heating system and benefit a businessman connected to the energy mafia in the country - the economic benefits of this scheme are linked precisely to the oligarch Hristo Kovacki, who was mentioned in part III of this text.
Despite this history of oligarchy, corruption and decay, we discover a new narrative on the Sofia TPP building - in the ruins of the crumbling infrastructure, a few black poplars have found a place to live. The black poplar, a species currently growing on the decaying roof of the thermal plant, is an ecologically flexible plant that thrives in a variety of environments and is often used to strengthen soil in disturbed terrain, becoming the basis for a web of lives even in polluted industrial areas. It offers a strange form of hope—its presence marks both the damage done by humans, and the potential for ecosystems to adapt and find transformation.
Although heat for many of the city's citizens depends on the production of the Sofia Thermal Power Plant (since currently it is the only plant tailored to provide enough heat to Sofians - and coming from a single place), it embodies the infrastructural poetics where decay speaks of the contradictions of industrial ambition and its abandonment. Rusty pipelines meander alongside flourishing greenery, their juxtaposition telling a story of dereliction and unexpected vitality. Bushes, poplars, moss and other vegetation grow on the walls of the building, on its roof and along the rusty pipes. With its monolithic monotony and looming ruin, it remains the subject of overhanging debates of its closure. New ontologies await the moment this urban monument to the fossil fuel industry begins its change and decay.
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**** Central Sofia Cemetery Park
The cemetery park was opened in 1889. Since then, the Sofia cemetery has gradually increased in size, and in 2019 a decision was made for an official new extension in the direction of the Sofia TPP. The expansion is approximately one-tenth the size of the previous park. However, the new area differs greatly from the old one, as it is practically just a field of mud in which visitors inevitably get stuck. It was described in the media as "horrific".
However, the decay of the extension of the cemetery goes beyond aesthetics. In 2024 investigations reveal a grotesque economy of extortion and fraud. Cemetery officials are threatening families of the deceased with vandalism unless they are paid bribes. In reality, a racket is being carried out in which the relatives of the deceased are threatened that if they do not give money to suspicious persons, the graves of their relatives will be destroyed. Another operation is buying a grave in the old part of the park, by submitting a false application to move the body lying there. After fictitiously moving a grave from a richer, greenery old area, to some other place, fraudsters buy the corresponding plot "forever", under the name of another person for the sum of BGN 570. Their next step is finding a family that really needs a grave for their loved one, to whom the corresponding plot is offered for a sum of about 10 thousand BGN. In addition, gravestones are often removed from already occupied plots, which are then offered as vacant sites, although there still lie bodies.
The transformation of the cemetery is not simply an institutional failure, but a strange metaphor for interspecies ontology. The stark contrast between the overgrown old part and the landscape of the uncultivated and muddy new extension gives room for a range of deceitful schemes and the use of desire even in the dead. From the new mud fields with their sinking paths, visitors are accompanied by the constant monotonous ringing of the Sofia TPP, which is located right next to them. The sound of the power plant mingles with the landscape of decay and sorrow.
Meanwhile, the older parts of the cemetery are going wild. Shrubs climb the fences, their roots tangle with those of trees. Moss thrives on forgotten or destroyed headstones, mushrooms sprout around the names on the headstones. Beneath the surface are earthworms that slowly weave networks of tunnels into the soil with their rhythmic movements. In this space, the cemetery becomes an ecosystem, a place of unexpected vitality amid human neglect. Beneath the surface, the common earthworm quietly weaves its existence in the depths of the soil, carving underground tunnels that become conduits for water and air, nourishing roots and fungi. Together, these species create an underground network of interspecies connectivity and support.
Amid the graves and chimneys, invasive plants colonize the borders, while fungi and worms rewrite the soil's narratives. The cemetery and the Sofia TPP mirror each other - structures in decline interwoven between human and more-than-human ontologies.
VI. Conclusion
And this is our "Slavic-Bulgarian History". Full of transformations, post-totalitarian legacy, dynamics of corruption and fraud, but also with new life developing in the ruins of the crumbling urban structures. As power plants continue to spew poisons, methane and carbon dioxide that slowly help warm the Earth, and transforming infrastructures reveal the consequences of an authoritarian regime, as well as a disdain for governance and a penchant for fraud, some may still find a strange form of hope in the most unexpected places; the ruins of the decaying urban environment in Sofia take on a new life that slowly makes space for itself in the cracks. Through the slowed-down practice of the “art of noticing” that Anna Tsing calls us to, we contemplate how “making worlds is not limited to humans.… allowing room for more than one species (Tsing 2015 17, 22) even in a fully urban environment. Places of liminality, these infrastructural topos of the transformative, speak of changes in the urban landscape and the changing of a damaged planet. They reveal their ontology to those who are willing to see it and will be able to even far beyond humans. On the one hand, looking at the different layers of urban landscape surfaces, as Tim Ingold (Ingold 2010) advises, reveals a deep base layer of soil full of life, roots, fungi, invasive plants and worms, all of which speak of their inter-species entanglements; a middle infrastructural layer of decay, neglect, ruin and pollution, where bushes begin to take over paths and pipes once built for people; and yet another institutionally forgotten top layer of the landscape, where the cracks of the polluting fossil fuel industry open pathways for the bravest and most resilient species, which try to take over its crumbling roofs. At the same time, the worlds that we examined in the text easily confirm the thesis about the oligarchs as "the main actor in the Bulgarian Capitalocene." (Fevzi 2020) Albeit focusing on only four points of the boulevard, "Slavic Bulgarian History" is not just the name of a transport hub and an urban boundary, but a symbol of a complex interweaving between totalitarian heritage, modern economic dynamics and ecological transformation. Sofia is a city where the cracks in the infrastructure tell stories of ruin, corruption and adaptation. Whether we abandon hope in the time of the Anthropocene is up to us.
[1] Anna Tsing introduces the use of the concept of more-than-human at the expense of the concept of non-human to emphasize the inclusivity and mutual -multispecies entanglement between the human and non-human worlds. See Tsing, A. (2013) and. Tsing, A.L. (2014)
[2] European Commission v. Bulgaria, case C‑730/19, 12 May 2022. Court of Justice of the European Union.
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About the authors
Maria Ilieva is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice mainly revolves around painting and text. Having spent her life between three different countries, from an early age, Maria encounters the realities of immigrant life, the urgent need for adaptation in unfamiliar environments, and the limitations of language. Drawing on personal and collective memory, as well as various methods of recollection, she seeks ways to rethink boundaries—both social and self-imposed. More about her can be found here.
Martin Tomov is an anthropologist by education and part of the Greenpeace team in Bulgaria by profession. He has experience in projects exposing police violence and racism in urban environments and has authored research on the cultural history of antidepressants and the impact of climate adaptation policies on marginalized communities in Rotterdam. Today, he focuses on issues related to the climate crisis, the environment, and the biodiversity of the Black Sea.
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