SAPROMAT

The Literary Meetings festival, whose theme this year is Archaeology of Memory, considers the relation between individual recollections and the collective historical strata that settle over the fabric of the city. Beneath the Centre of Gravity, the artistic project of the Sapromat association (Michaela Dobreva and Boris Dalchev), belongs to that context: it transforms the space of the Largo in Sofia, opening a possibility to rediscover ourselves and our own history in the middle of one of the city’s emblematic places.

Around the Largo today stand some of the most important institutions in the country, and across the centuries the space has been a crossing point of several empires — the Roman, the Ottoman and, most recently, the Soviet. It carries the symbolic and historical weight of our existence, individually and as a community, together with a sense of significance at every moment. But this is exactly where the everyday intervenes: absorbed in our tasks and racing the clock, we pass at speed through the labyrinth of underpasses and arcades.

The artists catch that divergence at the crossing point itself, on one of the glass domes of the Largo, which for the duration of the festival becomes a tableau vivant (French for “living picture”). Across it the projections of anonymous silhouettes move lightly and without sound, and in them the footsteps of chance passers-by echo clearly. In the underpass itself stand several plinths on which, in place of precious archaeological finds, we discover several pairs of worn old shoes. Each is accompanied by stories that layer moments from the everyday life of their probably fictional owners over major historical turns — from protests to political instability.

Immersing ourselves in the environment of the installation, we come to feel the space more and more as a symbolic centre of the possible and impossible encounters between the inhabitants of the city across its different epochs of existence. But the need also grows heavier to sense our own place, position and choice, and to have them echo in others. Raising our eyes once more to the dome and catching the whole fragility of the situation, the question inevitably arises: how much does each of these steps weigh upon our present?

Curatorial text by Viktoria Draganova, translated from the Bulgarian.

Concept and realisation: Sapromat
Curator: Viktoria Draganova
Curator, Literary Meetings: Todora Radeva
Original text: Konstantin Georgiev
Camera: Stefan Vrachev
Assistant: Tanya Nedelcheva
Photography: Yana Lozeva

The event was organised with the financial support of the National Culture Fund.