Pauline Shongov, Maya Shopovа and Borislav Angelov met at Elitza Koeva's exhibition at Harvard, and shortly afterwards in 2020 they created the collective Off-site . In the first few years after their founding, they explored with artists and local communities places, cultures and materialities in the process of destruction in post-1990s Bulgaria. The exhibition "Ecologies of Prehod" at Swimming Pool is the first presentation of this research. Viktoria Draganova asked the questions.
Maya, Pauline and Borislav, all three of you have different educational and professional backgrounds, while your paths have crossed several times, leading to the launch of the Off-site collective. What actually brought you together in the beginning and how did you manage to merge your diverse interests into a new platform?
Pauline Shongov: We met in Boston in 2019 while Boris and Maya were completing their Masters in Architecture and I was starting my PhD in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard. The first time the three of us met was at Elitza Koeva’s exhibition in Harvard yard. It was serendipitous in many ways, and quickly became a telling pattern of how Off-site would eventually build and expand its network through close relationships.
Maya Shopova: As all three of us were part of the Bulgarian diaspora from a young age, we naturally started talking about what was going on back home, in terms of art and architecture. I was a Teaching Fellow at MIT at the time and co-teaching a studio on heritage preservation and adaptive reuse in Morocco, and I was very interested in how sites of ruin can be activated architecturally and otherwise.
Borislav Angelov: I have always followed the architectural discourse in Bulgaria as much as possible from a distance. Maya and I participated and won an honourable mention in the Veliko Turnovo International competition, and this was our first time working together on a project in our home country. As I had finished my Masters’ Thesis on Mafia Baroque, all three of us met and the conversations naturally crystallised in the desire to work together. We were lucky to receive two grants from Harvard to launch the project. For the first four years, we worked virtually with the artists through zoom meetings, uploading their work on our website as part of an online exhibition. Swimming Pool was the first time our initiative found itself in a physical space.
You are also brought together by the biographical fact that your families left Bulgaria in the 1990s - does this also somewhat dictate your interest in the transition?
PS: The project developed with this interest in the 90s, and the notion of Prehod, both as what it has left and is leaving behind, but also its diasporic outcome. The era of Prehod is what saw the biggest exodus of Bulgarians abroad, and this was our experience as well. I was born in Arizona, Maya moved to Canada at the age of three and Boris to Chicago at the age of fifteen. From the start, and not only because of the pandemic, we were always working from outside in. We were interested in what diasporic networks we could activate to collect prompts, get them to the US, process them in some form (for instance having the Harvard herbaria package herbs, or doing a material analysis of a piece of metal), and mail them out to the artists.
In your collective practice you combine art and architecture - but as I understand it, for each of you it is a process of accumulating and developing different interests that you bring with you. When did the theme of ruin, which is also central to the "Ecologies of Prehod" project, actually emerge?
PS: I came to the PhD with a background in art, filmmaking, and film studies. In my making practice at the time, I was working through ideas on how material traces relate to the history of place, notions of lack and excess, remainder and remains, official and unofficial narratives in the archive. When I began the PhD, I became interested in new materialist theory, media archaeology, and ecological thought that was animating visual and media studies and environmental humanities at the time. My dissertation topic developed along these lines to think about what culture of media and mediation had emerged from the ruins of socialist modernity in Bulgaria. Having moved from practice into writing, I wanted to move from writing into practice again - this time with a lens set on research and pedagogy. When I met Maya and Boris, it felt fitting to collaborate together in a place we had been thinking about for a while from perspectives informed by our various backgrounds in art, film, and architecture.
MS: I joined in the fall of 2020, right after I had spent some time in Bulgaria working on a strategy for the redevelopment of the Central Mineral Bathhouse in Sofia, with the team “Sofia Therme.” That project got me even more interested in architectural heritage in Bulgaria, but more specifically, what traces the 90s left behind on the architectural fabric, within a building like the Bathhouse, but also on the scale of the city and the landscape around.
The three of you, as well as some of the artists (Katarina Burin, Sam Ghantous) are affiliated with world-leading research institutions - Harvard, ETH Zurich, MIT. Which themes and approaches would you recognize as leading these places, what are the main issues they address?
PS: While there are certainly schools of thought that do emerge from institutions, it is not the place so much as the people that shape fields of study. I’m sure that for each of us this means something different. For me, there were thinkers, makers, and research methodologies I was exposed to throughout my time at Harvard that impressed themselves upon me in profound ways and that helped shape the vision we had for Off-site. For one, there was the Critical Media Practice program that provided a framework to model creative work as research in the academic space - one we thought deeply about as Off-site grew. There was also the Sensory Ethnography Lab, led by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, that foregrounded the documentary impulse in ways that we had to unmake and rethink anew in the context of what Off-site was trying to do.
I started my PhD in 2018 in a department that was then called Visual and Environmental Studies (later renamed to Art, Film, and Visual Studies). What ‘environmental’ stood for was not the science, but rather an exploratory notion on how the ecological, urban, and architectural converge with cinema, visual, and media studies. At the time, there was a strong foundation in new materialism, process philosophy, ecological thought, film theory, and spatial theory that scholars like Giuliana Bruno, Laura Frahm, and Tom Conley brought to the fore. The work coming out of the department often pushed the boundaries of understanding what constitutes medium, media, and matter and how expansive and malleable these terms can be even as they introduced logics of their own.
What I took away from the mentorship of faculty was an approach to thinking about research, writing, and practice-based work that placed emphasis on process as much as it did on objects of study. For Off-site, this meant that we considered as much the pre- and post-production space of curating work as we did about how to exhibit that work. A process-based approach taught us to think with, and not simply about, the continuous state of changing matter throughout Prehod, which we developed in tandem with the perspective on heritage preservation practice that Maya brought to the group.
You describe your collective as "research-based" but how do you approach your work with the artists, what methodologies do they use to respond to your assignments?
BA: Our initial discussions and refinement of the topics we were interested in, led to the creation of the conceptual framework around Prehod and the different stages we envisioned for our project. From the beginning we decided this would not be a customary exchange between curators and artists - we wanted to have a symbiotic relationship with the people we invited and use the conversations we had to inform next steps. The first prompt was a diagram and a conversation with the first three artists about what Prehod is. After that point, each prompt evolved based on our own research of different sites and histories of Bulgaria. With the different nature of each prompt, we selected artists whose work we believe would be fitting.
MS: We were lucky that we had gotten to know a lot of artists and their work from our time in Boston. When creating the prompts we were thinking simultaneously which artists we would invite with each prompt. For instance, Manar Moursi was working with hammams in Cairo and she felt like an ideal fit for the bathhouse prompt in Sliven. Elitza Koeva with her work on Socialist monuments in Bulgaria, deployed a methodology of exploring oral histories through interviews and film - became a great contributor to our first prompt. Katarina Burin and Nicolás Kisic Aguirre both share diasporic connections to Eastern Europe: Katarina’s practice around the anti-monument felt fitting for thinking with the industrial ruin of the textile factory, while Nicolás was keen on exploring diasporic intimacies to place through sound. Each artist’s unique methodology was carefully selected as we wanted to explore the radically different responses each prompt could produce.
PS: One way to go about this question is to identify how certain art practices fall into certain genres. For instance, one can point to parafiction in Katarina Burin’s work or speculative materialities in Sam Ghantous’s. For us, the curatorial approach was in itself already deeply attuned to methodologies that have always been at the core of any artistic practice: observation and thinking-with-matter either with form, content, or both. Aside from building a dispersed archive, the role of the prompts was, in one way, to wrestle the artists out of any preconceived notions towards making or workflow that they might have had. Instead, they were asked to encounter an unfamiliar object/sound/image for the first time and engage with it sensorially and durationally from a place of familiarity. Close observation in this way became a shared mode of inquiry for curators and artists alike. Often tied to traditional notions of preserving the past, observation as an artistic practice and research method in Off-site became something that we were as keen to question and trouble as preservation practice.
Did you ultimately reach any kind of synthesis or conclusion after working on the project over the past four years?
MS: We see this project as a long-term project, and in that sense instead of a synthesis, perhaps only a potential for expansion. That said, the project itself has developed greatly over the years. Although it was always emergent in nature, and most of the time a bit messy, we eventually clarified a methodology that helps us collaborate with artists across geographies. In the end, Off-site is interested in the legacy of Prehod - both physically as architectures and landscapes - and also diasporically, as networks and movements that have come into being since 1989. It is always hard to evaluate the significance of a period of time that is ongoing, so we imagine the project still has a lot of room to evolve.
BA: It was never about getting to a synthesis or reaching a certain conclusion. We used the term Prehod, with all of its historical, cultural, political and temporal baggage, as an entry point to the project. We never wanted to define it in our own way, or comment on all of its implications to Bulgaria. As Maya suggested we are interested in its physical and oral legacies and uncovering novel ways to engage and care from a distance. We have enjoyed this diasporic way of working and involving different actors and it is something we would carry forward.
PS: If we are to take the “thinking-with-matter” approach seriously, then there might never truly be a synthesis to the work. This is not only because Prehod is still in a process of becoming - that is, it finds itself on the unstable grounds of periodization as Maya points out - and therefore the research and work itself is always in the process of formation, but even beyond that, at the heart of the project lies an interest in asking and exploring questions more than providing answers or solutions. Landing in Swimming Pool gave us a first glimpse of the synergies that are made possible when we share space, collectively. What forms of communing might we hold space for is a question that we are bound to explore in the future. By communing here, I mean in diasporic intimacy with land and one another and in kinship with the ecological animacies of place - what Lori Khatchadourian calls the “afterlife of socialist modernity.”
What was the most curious or surprising result for you from the methodology you employed (sending prompts and stretching the working framework over a period of four years across different continents)?
MS: Although we chose the artists and have worked with them for so long now through this project, it was still so interesting how much each of the artists could relate to “Prehod.” This word that in some ways feels so local in Bulgaria, and even in Eastern Europe, all of a sudden gains valence as somewhat universal.
The night before the opening, we went to a restaurant near Swimming Pool, and had a very heated discussion of transition, diaspora, heritage, and it really hit us the extent to which the artists were in tune with the project, beyond even their own body of work. We felt we really hit a collective note. Although from afar, the artists revealed a layer, or patina, of Prehod - as thin as a coat of graffiti or texture on concrete, as visceral as a pumice stone on skin, as ephemeral as a ritualistic call for water… and could feed/add to these new ecologies, natural or digital: from movement of architectural and biological materials, to the translation of images online as new material samples that find themselves in the physical realm again on a curtain in the gallery space.
You have decided to keep "Prehod" in Bulgarian in the English title. What are the multiple perspectives that emerge in your exhibition? Is maintaining a balance between them important to you?
MS: We wanted the project to feel local to Bulgaria and felt that if we used the English translation of Prehod, “transition” it would become too abstract and general as a title. That is not to say that we are not playing with or are interested in the other definitions of “transition:” change of material states, geographic translation and historic transition. In fact we engage with all of the above in our project, but we feel that the word “Prehod” has an important presence in the field of historic preservation in Bulgaria, more than we can fully understand now.
BA: We wanted the project to speak to many different publics and at the same time we wanted to use how significant and all-encompassing the word has become in Bulgaria. Although uniquely Bulgarian, similar processes happened all around the Balkans and in other parts of the world which our artists could connect to. We made sure our discussions with the artists covered the various aspects of Prehod and how those reflected in their own experiences and through their work.
MS: The many points of view emerged in a surprising way when it became evident that the artists, each in their own way, as part of various diasporas themselves, could relate to Prehod. But in terms of other perspectives of Prehod, what became most interesting is how these seemingly latent ruins were ecologically very active at the smallest scale, and how through the work of the artists, some of these sites could gain circulation on a global scale. We don’t intend to glorify the ruins, we want to engage with them as actors in the everyday, instead of ignoring them.
PS: We must not forget that we are talking about an "ecologies of Prehod", i.e. a relatively networked understanding of the environment, plants, animals and people in a time of transition. I think this relationship between the local and the global is the classic tension between area studies and other disciplines, and it's something that we're trying to address and question.
Adding to the notion of the public as always plural in nature, one important aspect to include here is how the oral histories and embodied experience of the people living through Prehod play intimate and invisible roles throughout the exhibition. From herbalist Bai Stoyan’s herb gathering to carpenter Kolio’s tile collecting, we see these hands play as much of a role in shaping the archive as the hands of the maker and those of the curator. The question this then raises is what constitutes an archive of Prehod - a period that is just as quickly forming itself as the material culture throughout it is rapidly disappearing.
What are the next steps you are planning?
MS: Our next landing point will be at the ArtLab in Boston. The Artlab is not an exhibition space, it is more akin to performance and workshops, which will offer a different kind of challenge for us. We are hoping that the intervention will be much more focused on methodology and exchange with other groups at MIT and Harvard that work in heritage preservation, environmental humanities, and critical media practice.
PS: In the past decade, there have been several practice-based research labs that have emerged across the humanities in university environments. Testing what Off-site as a lab may look like in the near future is something that we look forward to engaging more closely at the ArtLab. Part of this exploration means understanding ‘what is a collective’ through conversations and collaborations we take up with other collectives. Another part of this exploration is to rethink what we do in the field, exhibition space, or archive as knowledge production that can be applied in the classroom. Research and pedagogy in this way share a common denominator: a dialogue across generations and geographies, and an act of communing together with the past and the present. We are eager to see where this new direction will take Off-site in the years to come.
Additional links:
Tao DuFour, Landscapes and Urban Environmentalities Lab
Lori Khatchadourian, Afterlife of Socialist Modernity
Azra Aksamija, Future Heritage Lab
Sir Isaac Julien and Marc Nash, Moving Image Lab
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