Monumental Negligence – or, how Bulgarian artists fight against monumental amnesia

Nowadays, Plovdiv’s residents continue to use the grounds around Bratska Mogila (the structure itself now officially off-limits to the general public) as a recreational area; young parents pushing along their baby prams, couples strolling hand-in-hand whispering sweet nothings, and the elderly, warming their bones in the sunshine and reminiscing about days gone by. Less socially accepted perhaps, Plovdiv’s youth have claimed Bratska Mogila as a favoured night-time spot for low-budget, adolescent pastimes such as skateboarding, smoking joints, drinking and flirting with each other. The monument’s slanted walls are crumbling and covered in graffiti now, with scrawled swastikas, spray-painted profanity, name tags and occasional white paint-overs jostling for supremacy.

These absent-minded forms of daily usage represent a significant re-appropriation of these symbols of former state hegemony, as they reflect their radically changed status. However, they are being dealt with on more conscious, observational and analytical levels by somewhat more specialised strata of civic actors, such as academics and contemporary visual artists.

At the tail end of 2012 we[4] curated the exhibition Socialism’s Material Residue – legitimacy & (re)appropriation of Bulgaria’s socialist monuments at Gallery WM in Amsterdam. Socialism’s Material Residue focused on Bulgaria’s monumental socialist structures and sculptures and their use today, since they have outlived the political period that they were supposed to represent. It sought to explore issues of spatial discourse, politics, legitimacy and (re)appropriation surrounding existing socialist monuments in a post- socialist era. Aside from the quality of their work, the relatively unobtrusive, non-politicised and ambiguous manner in which they chose to deal with Bulgaria’s socialist inheritance prompted us to invite five Bulgarian artists – Georgi Bogdanov, Neli Georgieva, Nikola Mihov, Boris Missirkov and Krassimir Terziev – to participate in the exhibition.

Forming the bulk of the exhibition in Amsterdam, Nikola Mihov’s stark, black & white photographic series Forget Your Past is an impressive, reactive attempt at remembrance of a legacy that many in Bulgaria have actively tried to forget. Travelling throughout the country, interviewing sculptors, architects and ordinary citizens, he traced the history of the monuments, collected archival material and, of course, took photographs. Austere, melancholic and faintly nostalgic, his often frontal, realistic documentation and minute attention to historical veracity resulted in an eponymous publication in 2012. Forget Your Past reveals some of the most impressive monuments built during the socialist era in Bulgaria. A haunting testimony to the monuments’ faded and failed grandeur, Mihov’s intentions seem to be an attempt at bridging a negligent present with a discarded past; a Quixotean rejection of collective amnesia and indifference. The series includes such Soc-Realist specimens as the Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia (1954), Burgas (1954) and Plovdiv (1957), brutalist megaliths like the Monument to the Resistance in Vidin (1963), and ‘revivalist’, Zhivkova-era memorials such as Plovdiv’s afore- mentioned Bratska Mogila (1974) and the grandiose Memorial House of the Bulgarian Communist Party (1981) atop Mount Buzludzha. The title of Mihov’s project is a direct reference to this last monument; above its entrance an anonymously scrawled graffito in giant red lettering presciently reads: Mihov's book, incidentally, figured in a performative piece within artist Anton Terziev's 200% Pure Past in 2015. In the video, one sees Terziev glueing the book together, page by page, until he finally produces a hermetically sealed brick of book. Created during the heated debate that raged surrounding the impending demolition of the 1300 Years of Bulgaria monument, Terziev appears to imply that by dismantling this admittedly controversial monument, the general public as well as the powers that be were relegating the uncomfortable historical narrative that the monument represents to a 200% pure past. Although we are by no means certain of Terziev's intentions with his work, the word play on Mihov's title is undeniable.

Time and again, the question of what to do with Bulgaria's Socialist monuments keeps recurring in the work of Bulgarian contemporary artists. Undoubtedly as result of the large number of memorials and the gargantuan scale of many of them, the question won't disappear any time soon. To restore or destroy, renovate or demolish, redeem or leave to rot? More often than not, after the Transition, Bulgarian authorities have opted for benign negligence and incremental deterioration. The value of these monuments, although heatedly debated by the more consciously engaged strata of Bulgarian society, is, nonetheless, often-times left as a question for later by Bulgarian authorities, both locally and nationally. Practicalities, such as the question of ownership, budget, day-to-day issues and treaties are often invoked as reasons for leaving things as they are. Dereliction and procrastination are, then, the sad consequence.

Perched on top of Turna hill, overlooking the seaside town of Varna, the massive Monument Park to Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship was finalised in 1978, vaguely resembling two hands interlocked in stone- carved solidarity. Its massive wings bear four helmeted Soviet soldiers on one side, and three welcoming Bulgarian women in folk costumes on the other. Designed by architect Kamen Goranov and sculptors Alyosha Kafedzhiyski and Evgeni Baramov, the behemoth included 10,000 tons of concrete and 1000 tons of armature iron. Grim and forbidding, this mass of concrete, steel and stone is the subject of another artist video, Trace(1) (2008) by Neli Georgieva, as part of a larger European project of the same name that has tried to evaluate the hereditary value of monuments from the socialist period and how to integrate them into contemporary space. In a subtly sympathetic way, Georgieva’s documentary focuses on the monument’s present state, identity, cultural memory, and how to integrate its history with the present. The artist interviews academics, scientists and citizens who recount their memories and give their opinion about the monument; its construction and function during socialist- and post-socialist times. Tellingly, Georgieva comes across a group of adolescents, idling high upon the star-emblazoned helmets of the Soviet soldiers, who “unanimously declare that [they] know absolutely nothing about this monument.” As implied above, Varna's authorities have chosen the route of inadvertent abandonment. However, echoing the apolitical and subdued tone of her work, one of the interviewed sculptors of the monument, Alyosha Kafedjiyskij, prophetically argues that “time decides the true value of things”.[5]

Within the exhibition at Gallery WM, we included another insightful video work that kept us fascinated; Monu-mental from 2011. Here, contemporary artist and visual anthropologist Krassimir Terziev observes a public space that is popular among Sofia’s youth, namely, the Monument to the Soviet Army. Throughout his artistic research, Terziev investigates the role of urban space in cultural and socio-economic practices, as well as the presence and absence of memory in the spatial praxis of the city’s inhabitants, i.e. how people use, abuse and appropriate public space. Monu-mental shows us how the dilapidated monument has become a fixture in the urban structure of the city, where its residents have colonised the site in habitual ways and, by doing so, turn them into personalised memories. Terziev combines the rather opaque visual scenes with added audio samples taken from drama films, implanting an ambience of tension into his work. Despite the undeniable physical presence of the monument, its ideological aura has been emasculated, its inscriptions of power rescinded, and thus, rendered absent. This juxtaposition of presence and absence, of dramatic sonic codes and mundane imagery, creates an atmosphere of suspense; this is a site where anything can happen, and quite a number of events did happen.

Situated in a park in the heart of the city, this Monument to the Soviet Army was inaugurated in 1954 in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Socialist Revolution in Bulgaria and became one of its landmarks, used in state-organised celebrations as well as for recreation and leisure. Approaching the memorial complex, one encounters two free-standing sculptural compositions depicting the Bulgarians’ joy at the Soviet army’s victorious campaign of liberation. The centrepiece is a 37-metre high pillar with a statue of a Soviet soldier on top, machine-gun in hand, raised towards the heavens. He is flanked by a male and a female figure with her child, embodying the working proletariat and the peasantry, respectively. The pillar stands atop a stair-cased platform, its base framed by three bronze bas-reliefs displaying Russia’s October Revolution, various momentous battles from WWII, and the Herculean effort of the post-war reconstruction. The monument itself – or rather the aura that surrounds it, despite being centrally located along a wide busy thoroughfare, is dominated by a feeling of emptiness. The wide open spaces surrounding the monument have become especially inviting for skate-boarders, breakdancers and hip-hoppers which, although gainful subcultural pastimes in themselves, give the complex a rather forlorn and godforsaken aspect.

One of – if not – the earliest, more seriously conceptualised projects to have arisen from the debate about what to do with this centrally located monument and its surrounding grounds, was designed by Diana Popova and Dobrin Peichev in 1991. It suggested removing the bas-reliefs and sculptures to a basement under the monument and incorporating the pedestals and grounds surrounding it to form a new Centre for Avant-Garde and Modern Art (CAMA or TsAMI). The designs consisted of sketches and blueprints for the construction of this new centre, also in the form of a publication in Puls newspaper. This piece of action art was a poignant reminder of the fact that Bulgaria still did not have a centre of contemporary or non-conventional art.

A radical if more symbolic approach was proposed by Lyuben Kostov in 1993, who suggested gradually burying the controversial site with earth, and thence aiming to cool the heated rhetoric surrounding it. In essence, Kostov tried to soothe the historical trauma by creating a poultice-like mound, reminiscent perhaps of the Thracian or Slavic mogilas that dot the Bulgarian landscape. A highly symbolic burial of the recent past, 9 Collages on a Common Grave as a Metaphor had, at heart, a very future-oriented slant as Kostov imagined future generations excavating the mound who could then, dispassionately, decide whether the archaeological artefacts entombed within would merit conservation or not.

Undoubtedly because of its potency as a symbol of Soviet hegemony in Bulgaria, the Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia became a natural focal point for street protests in the immediate aftermath of Bulgaria's transition from a socialist country to a nominally democratic and wildly capitalistic free-for- all. A jubilant and quite cheeky celebration of the carnivalesque ensued, with the public revelling in the playful vandalism of heretofore venerable and vigilantly guarded symbols of the 'old' order.

The bas-relief designed by sculptor Vasil Zidarov, on the Western side of the monument, depicts Soviet soldiers in the act of attacking their foes. And it is this specific bas-relief that has borne the brunt of some of the loudest and most visually explicit controversies in the public discourse regarding the fate of Bulgaria’s socialist monuments. Repeatedly targeted, with both paint and graffiti by the more playful strata of Bulgaria’s activists and artists, this bas-relief has had an especially tumultuous life in Bulgarian socio-political critique. During a demonstration at the monument, one of these spontaneous civic 'interventions' comprised an act of defacement, whereby four elements were painted in the colours blue, red, green and yellow. We're not completely sure, but the colours could have been references to both Bulgaria's tri-colour as well as to the colour of the UDF[6] union of opposition parties. This act of playful vandalism was photographically documented by the artist (Sveto)Zara Alexandrova. Based on this documentation, she executed a frontal oil painting of said bas-relief in 1999. It is monochromatic except for the colouristic embellishments, thereby immortalising it in a, presumably cleaner, more polished form. Hence, the painting became a stylised representation not simply of the bas-relief itself, but of the civic unruliness that was characteristic of the time, in a visual language that is presumably legible to those Bulgarians who had been witness to the street protests, in jubilation at the fall of the Communist government and in celebration of the absurd.

Another artist who has depicted the Monument to the Soviet Army is Vasilena Gankovska. In a particularly broad-stroked city-scape, she depicts the ubiquitous logo of the ever-striding Johnny Walker on top of a building. A building that, like so many across the former Eastern block, routinely figure as giant billboards for the new heroes of Bulgarian economic reality. In the foreground of the painting one might notice the thinly traced silhouette of the Soviet Army monument. It casts a faint yet lingering shadow over the brash colours of Happy Consumption that have dominated Bulgaria's commercial socio-aesthetic visual schemes ever since the Transition.

On the night of June 17th 2011, our – by now – famous Soviet soldiers were painted over to resemble superheroes Wonder Woman, Superman, Wolverine and Captain America, as well as Santa Clause and Ronald McDonald. Spray-painted below it was written “In Step with Time” in Bulgarian; a comical commentary on Bulgaria’s head-long dive into Western-dominated pop-culture. It was not until later that this specific transfiguration was identified as the work of a group of artists known as Destructive Creation. The intervention was very effective as the transmutation of Soviet soldiers into American pop- cultural icons was symbolically incredibly easy to understand and was, technically speaking, exceptionally well executed.

Destructive Creation

In step with the time, 2011.

Graffiti

Details

• Photographer: Destructive Creation
• Material: spray paint

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• Property of: Destructive Creation
• Description: Transforming soldiers from the Soviet Army monument in Sofia as American comic heroes.
• Copyright: Destructive Creation

Time and again, most often anonymously and not always by Destructive Creation, the sculptural composition has been the focal point for mischievous interventions. These have included commentaries on events like the 1968 suppression of the Prague Spring (inspired by Czech artist David Cerny’s 1991 intervention in Prague, the composition was painted a jarring pink, the graffito beneath it reading: ‘Bulgaria Apologises’ in both Czech and Bulgarian), the imprisonment of Russian punk-rock group Pussy Riot (the soldiers now donning Pussy Riot’s signature balaclavas), and Russian interference and subsequent invasion of Ukrainian territory (in the blue and yellow colours of the Ukrainian flag) amongst many other such subversions. Thus, from an affirmation of Bulgaria’s gratitude to the Soviet army, through the abnegation of the recent political past, the hulking structure has now become a message board for critique and discontent, successfully grabbing domestic and international headlines.

That being said, Russia's response to the repeated – albeit playful – vandalistic interventions of the monument has been vigorous and reproachful. Although we cannot go into it here in depth, Russia's relationship with its Soviet past (whether within Russia itself or the satellite countries under its influence) has been fraught with tension. It seems to have become a mixture of a revalorisation of its military feats, a revanchist attitude at the loss of its influence and a revisionist stance towards the historical crimes committed during its erstwhile domination of its neighbours. Invariably, after each defacement, the Russian Embassy's letters to the Municipality of Sofia have been rife with indignation, resentment and forceful reminders of the treaty that the two countries signed that compels Bulgaria to safeguard memorials to Soviet soldiers.

Destructive Creation struck gain in 2013, this time in Bulgaria's second city, Plovdiv. With a simple yet effective gesture, they tied a red cape around the neck of a giant, ferro-concrete Soviet soldier, effectively transforming this soldier of Socialism into a decidedly American pop-cultural icon from Krypton. Plovdiv's Monument to the Soviet Army, constructed from 1954 to 1957, is a nearly 11-metre high, reinforced concrete statue of a Soviet soldier on top of a 6 metre-high pedestal, crowning Bunardzhyk hill, overlooking the city. Popularly known as “Alyosha”, the giant structure was modelled on Alexey ”Alyosha” Ivanovich Skurlatov, a young Red Army soldier from the Altai mountains who helped set up telephone lines from Plovdiv to Sofia during WWII. Rumour and most definitely propaganda has it, that in 1944, the 'population' of Plovdiv proposed, by popular vote, a giant monument of gratitude to the Soviet Army to celebrate its glorious feat of liberating Bulgaria from Fascism. After several rounds of rejected designs and redesigns, the state-appointed 'artistic committee' settled on a design of a singular figure by Boris Markov, Petar Tsvetkov, and Nikolai Marangozov and sculptors Vassil Radoslavov, Georgi Kotzev, Ivan Topalov and Alexander Zankov. Alyosha dominates Plovdiv's skyline and hence overshadows its cityscape. Although he was fêted as a symbol for the city during socialist times, after the Transition Alyosha became an understandably contentious figure. The municipal council decided several times in the 1990's to demolish the overbearing memorial. All attempts to do so, however, were rebutted by several groups of the public who demanded its preservation, not least among whom was the Russian Foreign Ministry, aside from representatives of various veteran groups as well as the successors[7] to the revamped Bulgarian Communist Party. Finally, however, the monument seems to have been saved from destruction by two mutually reinforcing reasons. Firstly, as mentioned above, Bulgaria and Russia had previously signed an agreement that stipulated that both countries would respect and preserve each other's memorials on their respective territories. This was, indeed, the opinion of Bulgaria's Supreme Court in 1998, as a response yet again, to another attempt by Plovdiv's municipal council to demolish the statue. Furthermore, or perhaps more fundamentally, it was deemed extremely hazardous to even try to destroy the thing, as giant debris from even a controlled explosion were likely to endanger both people and their houses at the base of the hill.

Destructive Creation

Superhero - a criminal, 2013.

Street Art

Details

• Material: fabric

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It would be a crime if there was no mention of several other, rather creative suggestions to 'interfere' with the monument. In the riveting documentary Stories with Monuments by Krassimir Terziev and Ivaylo Ditchev from 2009, the former deputy mayor of Plovdiv, Atanas Badev, recounts some of the proposals that he considered executing but ultimately failed to do – to his great chagrin, we can be sure.

One of the more daring proposals considered was installing a type of watering can at the base of the monument, running a hose up the length of the statue and letting a trickle of acid pour on top of Alyosha's head, slowly disintegrating the poor soldier down to a melted blob of nothingness. Another, more diplomatic, idea was suggested by sculptor Kiril Naydenov and artist Anastas Konstantinov, proposing Alyosha to be 'wrapped' in an orb-like, gold-plated installation that was to reflect the sun. They magnanimously offered to keep Alyosha whole, and even leave several peep-holes so that those who wished to commemorate the heroic soldier, could do so, albeit partially. A more capitalist approach was also proposed, we think in all seriousness, to turn Alyosha into a giant Coca-Cola bottle! The idea was that the municipality would then receive revenue for the advertising of the world's most recognisable and iconic brand. On a more conceptual level, members of the Plovdiv-based EDGE group thought to divest Alyosha's cult-symbolism by replicating the original and placing them on all of Plovdiv's five remaining hills. These replicas would necessarily be made from Styrofoam or some such other light, cheap material. This action was envisaged to be done overnight, so that the following morning Plovdiv's residents would wake up to multiple Alyoshas. It later turned out that the concept also entailed the later removal of all six Alyoshas, even the original one, in a flurry of helicopters. In Stories with Monuments however, ex-deputy mayor Badev made clear that Bulgaria's air-force did not, in fact, possess any helicopters whatsoever that would be able to carry off Alyosha's head, let alone the rest of his body. Needless to say, none of these proposals was ever executed, but we sincerely hope that the proposals may never stop coming in![8] In fact, as part of the Plovdiv European Capital of Culture 2019, the afore-mentioned Missirkov / Bogdanov-duo designed and created lollipops in the form of Alyosha in different colours. What may not have been possible to do with the original monument, it is clear that many Bulgarian artists try to redefine, obliterate or disintegrate the statue in more conceptual ways, including having the monument sucked on and masticated by culturally-minded sweet-tooths.

Socialist monuments are by no means the only surfaces that Bulgarian artists intervene on and the prolific Destructive Creation group is no exception. One of the two lions in front of the Palace of Justice is a case in point and has also been tampered with to serve as an allegory for the particularly sluggish pace in which the justice system was being reformed. Placed in 1985 in front of what was then the National History Museum in Sofia[9], sculptor Velichko Minekov opted for a neo-classicist rendition of Bulgaria's heraldic animal. They were placed there at the behest of first daughter Lyudmila Zhivkova (1942 - 1981) who had earlier strong-armed the Ministry of Justice to relocate in favour of the National History Museum in the same building. In 2013 the lion was spray-painted and transformed into a decidedly The Joker-looking character, clearly as a commentary on the state of law it was supposed to guard. The word 'CYRK'[10] was spray-painted on its pedestal, leaving little to the imagination of how the activist group perceived the reform of the judicial system in Bulgaria.

Destructive Creation

20 years of circus, 2013.

Graffiti

Details

• Material: spray paint

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Bulgaria's national animal was used as an oblique allegory in Nadezhda Oleg Lyahova's photographic documentation series (and eponymous video) Lions of Sofia from 2004. The series generally deals with issues of poverty and homelessness in Sofia and portrays the creatures (many of them human) that inhabit and occupy the capital's streets. In a particularly sympathetic way, Lyahova transfers the regal courageousness that the animal symbolises, to the city's less fortunate inhabitants and re-imagines them as the true lions of Sofia. One photograph especially caught our attention; a stray dog, languidly warming its bones in the same reclining position as the leonine sculpture it has chosen to rest against. Unveiled in 1941, artist Andrey Nikolov's lion was swiftly considered too 'bourgeois' for its time and location and was moved around Sofia before being stored in the National Military Museum. The lion was returned to its former place in 1981, when the new Monument of the Unknown Soldier was inaugurated. Since then it has become, and remains, a favourite climbing spot for children.

For us, the series speaks to the rapid disintegration of a previous communal order, the chaotic uncertainty of the post-Transition period, and a subsequent collective failure to take care of the country's most vulnerable. The stray dog who lazes his day away on the monument could, furthermore, be seen as an invalidation of Bulgarian pride as well as a testament to the desacralisation of monuments in general and their irreverently swift re-appropriation by Sofianites to become part and parcel of the urban landscape.

Where Lyahova documents one reclining stray dog – albeit in a position of sublime repose – the ever proliferant Krassimir Terziev features Sofia's stray dogs abundantly in a series of four[11] panoramic composites of Sofia's city-scape. Terziev's series Post-Urban Landscapes from 2003 superimposes a multitude of strays meandering across the urban landscape. As the series progresses from one panorama to another, so does the size of these roaming canines. In his own words, Terziev sees the dogs as “...signs of nature’s vindication over culture, when Sofia was flooded with stray dogs and nature seemed to take back the city...”[12] He imagined that the dogs were mutating and gradually becoming bigger, finally surpassing the size of all the other man-made structures.

Although we can definitely run with Terziev's imaginative associations, we've – admittedly – added a couple of our own. We speculate that the iconic architectural structures that Terziev has fused together to create his panoramic Sofia-scapes, represent layers of previously built-up urban infrastructure. An infrastructure that, though spanning the relatively short but entire history of Sofia as capital city, was heavily imprinted on by its socialist caretakers and overbearingly regulated in the way that its public spaces were managed. We imagine the dogs, on the other hand, wandering this way and that, oblivious to commonly accepted rules governing the flow of human traffic, and disdainful of the boundaries that separate public walkways from, say, grassy lawns or concrete monuments. Our frolicking fleabags represent then the somewhat shambolic process that Bulgaria's contemporary reality has morphed into from its more structured past. Where once a controlled – albeit uneasy – order and pompous grandeur reigned supreme, now vagabonds, loiterers, street-hawkers, con-artists, skateboarders, graffiti-vandals, ad-men, dogs and, worst of all, developers haphazardly trample over Sofia's squares, monuments, and basically; its previously inviolable sancrosanctity of public order.

One of Terziev's panoramas has the grandiose public square in front of the National Palace of Culture[13] (NDK) as its setting. The vantage point being from one of NDK's outside terraces, the open space in front has been inundated by an influx of superimposed mongrels. For us – as we've said above – they function as a metaphor for the liberalisation of public space and the triumph of informal practices over this formerly disciplined space reserved for orchestrated gatherings and public rituals. Although we would love to wax loquacious about the bizarre, octagonal, Egypto-pyramid-esque NDK with an unblinking Eye of Sauron that dominates its frontal facade, textual space is limited. Suffice to say for now, that it is an imposing and strikingly dominating presence, and that it overlooks Bulgaria Square towards what used to be, until very recently, the 1300 Years of Bulgaria Monument.

1981 was a big year for big monuments. The 1300th anniversary of the existence of Bulgaria as a state was celebrated on a grand scale. Not only was this moment a commemoration of a glorious past, but also a self-congratulatory glorification of the present, as well as an inescapable promise for the future. This stage of Bulgarian Socialism was presented as a triumphant achievement of Bulgaria's illustrious history which – following the precepts of the theoretical doctrine of Scientific Communism – would ultimately culminate in the form of Communism, “...the perfect, utopian, social structure of the future, ...”.[14] This grand narrative that fused the past, present and future into one big, shimmering phantasm, was mediated and disseminated en masse in the form of articles, books, exhibitions, sports achievements and significantly, documentaries and films. The mass-erections of mighty monuments were intended as undeniable, indestructibly concrete attestations to a narrational mirage that was ephemeral at best. Not only was the Monument to the Unknown Soldier unveiled in 1981, but the Palace of Culture (NDK) was opened, Buzludzha was inaugurated, the Monument to the Founders of the Bulgarian State in Shumen was finished, as was the 1300 Years of Bulgaria Monument.

The 1300 Years[15] is an interesting case in point when it comes to the various contesting narratives that have dominated Bulgaria's discourse surrounding what to do with Socialism's more eye-catching monuments and symbols. This monument was intended to embody the resolute, ascendant evolution of the Bulgarian soul. When it was unveiled, however, it evoked many a gasp of shock and disdain, if only for its decidedly unfinished look. Clearly a rush-job, the monument extolling the glorious 1300 years of Bulgarian statehood was finished up with sheets of plywood, painted (nearly) the colour of granite, trying to blend in with the rest of the panels that actually were made of granite. It is rumoured that First Secretary Todor Zhivkov, so infuriated and disgusted by the 'monstrosity', ordered his chauffeur never to drive by the ungainly thing again. By 1989 it had already deteriorated badly, its panels falling off, its subterranean level becoming a haunt for drug addicts and homeless people. After the Transition, Bulgarian artists were at the forefront to urge public opinion and the authorities to preserve the monument, if only as an historical reminder. In the summer of 2017, debates were abruptly discontinued as the Sofia City Council ordered the monument's demolition. Again people protested (and a suspected arson attempt even postponed the demolition for a little while), to no avail however as the monument was finally torn down at the end of July. Aside from the monument's symbolic weightiness – having been erected on the site of a former war monument, not to mention the grandiose pomposity of the monument's title – it is perhaps also its unfinished character, bizarre cubo- abstract shape and general aura of immediate decay, that simply begs artists to react to it. Its shape offered a wonderful opportunity to make a statement, intervene or ridicule. At the same time, it also quite probably worked to endear it to many within Bulgaria's critical community, including precisely those artists who poked fun at it in the first place.

In his series Objects and Spaces II, Alexander Valchev composes two triptychs that present recompositions of the 1300 Years of Bulgaria monument. Perhaps inspired by the clunkiness of this hulking structure, Valchev presents photographed details in two sets of three squares, realigning the cubist elements to create alternate versions of the monument. What strikes us is the jigsaw puzzle effect that these recompositions achieve. It gives the impression, that if one were to reshuffle the cards yet again, the result would be quite similar. This need not be so surprising, as the original design – with all due respect to its architects and sculptor Valentin Starchev – could also be seen as a haphazard composition of abstract -constructivist structures and cubo-brutalist chunks. Interestingly, the chunks of 1300 Years that Valchev selects bear the hallmarks of much of his other work where he utilizes cardboard boxes to create temporary monumental structures. Fortress II for example, shown in 2016 in Munich as part of The Fortress exhibition[16] is an imposing, nearly two-and-a-half metre tall cardboard box structure that, despite the throw-away nature of its material, convinces as an extremely solid brutalist structure that one could easily come across exploring Bulgaria's landscape. This is a recurring theme in much of his work. His solo-exhibition The Sculpture as a Hobby in 2014[17] at Sofia's Arosita Gallery, for example, features a piece, made from stacked cardboard boxes; Untitled/ New “Endless” Column (2014) that, though rather graceful, has some uncanny similarities to the upward dynamic aimed for by Starchev in the 1300 Years. Not having spoken to him directly, we can only assume that his focus on material, especially the disposable varieties, parallels the unfinished and now disposable 1300 Years of Bulgaria Monument.

A very different artist who also focused on the the monument's material aspect is Stela Vasileva in her drawing for a poster she did of an underground performance festival in 2015. The drawing aptly recreates the 'under construction' aspect of the monument from its very inception in 1981.

One piece of work that features the 1300 Years Monument by the afore-mentioned contemporary artist Luchezar Boyadjiev immediately made us laugh. Boyadjiev juxtaposes two images, that of the 1300 Years in Sofia as well as that of a child-friendly version of a raptor dinosaur clutching an egg. This second dinosaur is located somewhere in the environs of the hideously, mass-tourism inundated seaside resort of Sunny Beach (Slanchev Bryag). Both – shall we say – 'sculptures' bear a strikingly humorous resemblance to one another. They were, obviously, constructed with completely different intentions in mind. The first, in Sofia, eulogised Bulgaria's past and propounded the path to the country's ambitiously glorious future. The other, quite probably made from fibreglass, is a manifestation of an entertainment-oriented, consumerist culture that that future seems to actually have become. Though so far apart ideologically, Boyadjiev seems to remind us that both structures are similarly absurd. Both implicitly reflect the pompous promises that the sculptures respectively symbolise and serve as metaphors for the ideological systems that spawned them. The first is the love-child of a totalitarian, socialist, imperfect and ultimately failed regime whose legacy simply refuses to disappear. The other is, as Luchezar was keen to point out: “...[a by-product of] a supposedly better, consumerist society based on free market economy and representative, parliamentary democracy that never came as [was] promised – to solve all our problems at once...”[18]

One piece that dealt with the impending demise of the 1300 Years was an intervention event organised by the group Ultrafuturo in 2008.

Available as a single channel video and a series of twenty colour photographs, it documents the event in front of the monument, where passers-by were asked to write on a wall, indicating whether they supported or rejected the demolition of the monument. This piece was prescient as it turned out, as people were also given the opportunity to take a last 'memory-picture' in front of the structure. Opinions were very divided, in keeping with the controversy that the monument had given rise to. Those that had participated in the construction of the monument opted for it to be renovated and maintained, others espoused rather cliché slogans of anti-communist rhetoric and, finally, youngsters, many of whom had not witnessed the Transition consciously, by-and-large thought it might make an excellent skate-boarding ramp.

A more digital approach was the project ReVision from 2013 by the Transformatori group. As support for the candidacy of Sofia as the European Cultural Capital 2019, Transformatori used the monument as a giant projection screen in an attempt to revaluate this and other neglected monuments. They attempted to translate them to a contemporary historical context through the use of digital and interactive technology. As part and parcel of the intervention, the team organised a competition and workshop for 3D-mapping on the surface of the monument. Focussing on city monuments as places of shared cultural and historical values, Tranformatori maintain that monuments influence and send messages to generations, through generations, and thus generate emotions, aesthetics and social interactions.

The issue of trans-generational communication becomes very apparent in the tribulations that surround(ed) the Mausoleum of the first Head of State of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, Georgi Dimitrov. No longer extant, the Mausoleum was the embalmed embodiment of Bulgaria as a Socialist People's Republic after 1944. Built in just six days, the neoclassical Mausoleum proved uncannily difficult to remove and provides a striking metaphor for the speed in which Bulgarian Socialism was founded, the difficulty Bulgaria faces in removing the dysfunctional aspects of its legacy, and the chaotically 'retractionist' attempts – after the Transition – to render this domineering past invisible. As Socialist ideology was quickly being discarded to the rubbish heap of history, so too many in Bulgaria seemed to want to obliterate its monumental markers from collective memory.

The Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov was a key landmark in the communist era of Sofia. Built just days after Dimitrov’s death, this massive, white marbled, Stalinist structure housed his embalmed remains until they were removed, cremated, and finally placed to rest at Sofia's Central Cemetery in 1990. A prestige project by the government's pro-Western, anti-Communist Prime Minister Ivan Kostov, he maintained that the destruction of this symbol of totalitarian repression was imperative, despite popular opinion against such a move. After several, quite frankly embarrassing, attempts to blow it up, it was finally blasted in 1999 at the fourth attempt in a series of controlled detonations. Amusingly (and we have heard this quite a number of times), whenever foreigners are guided by locals through the fair city of Sofia, this empty space is invariably pointed to as the former place where Dimitrov's Mausoleum used to be. Thus, the monument's absence ironically remains ever-present, perhaps even more so now, after its disappearance as a physical structure, if not a mental one.

Petko Dourmana

Bluetooth_Graffiti, 2006.

Digital Art

Details

• Material: http://openartfiles.bg/en/topics/1434-%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%B3%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%BD%D0%B8-%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%BA%D1%83%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%B0-%D0%B2-%D0%B1%D1%8A%D0%BB%D0%B3%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%8F-%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE

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• Property of: Petko Dourmana

Unsurprisingly, there have been quite a number of works that relate to this monument and it is worthwhile mentioning Ivan Moudov's Untitled/ Intervention in public space, faked new construction of a public/private building on the location of the former Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov, Sofia, 11.2012. Moudov announced a public event and designed an accompanying poster to announce a 'fake' opening of a building that very much resembled the old mausoleum. The design basically added an upper story or two in what looks to be black granite or marble on top of the pre-existing structure, ensuring the public's ire and alarm, and understandably so. As it turned out, this was Moudov's plan all along; to generate debate and discussion about what to do with these kinds of monuments. He was thereby poking a stick at what he probably perceived as Bulgaria's collective, monumental amnesia. Generating a great deal of public and media attention, Moudov was forced to concede the mischievous gag prematurely and assure everyone that it was, indeed, a fake proposal.

The fight against communal amnesia is also of prime concern in Petko Dourmana's Bluetooth Graffiti from 2006. Convinced that the radical disappearance of Dimitrov's Mausoleum was an unhealthy form of forgetfulness, Dourmana decided to regain the lost physicality of the Mausoleum in virtual space with the aid of the mobile phone-carrying visitor. Via the Bluetooth function, visitors could access a compendium of old documentation, photographs, video and audio fragments that would open the floodgates of collective memory. A (for then) new digital technology was employed to recreate that which was not only actively being forgotten, but had urgently been destroyed. As the former Prime Minister of Bulgaria Philip Dimitrov (UDF) is quoted saying: “the rational thing is that some things stay, and others must be erased. From that point of view, this symbol was the most appropriate to be destroyed.”[19]

Rational it may have been, yet erasure, as any psychologist, sociologist or anthropologist will tell you, is ultimately detrimental to a body's health, whether that body be private or collective. The Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov, or rather, its absence, shows that the removal of history's physical markers, does not remove history itself.

Absence took pride of place in the proposal by curators and art critics Svetlana Kuyumdzhieva and Dessislava Dimova for Bulgaria's participation in the 2013 Venice Biennale. In their The Bulgarian Pavilion, Kuyumdzhieva and Dimova proposed an alternative interpretation of a national pavilion with a series of artistic activities in various locations and within different institutional structures over a period of two years (2011 - 2013). Though participating physically at the site of the Biennale in Venice via video-link, the spatial void left by the demolition of Dimitrov's Mausoleum was intended to be the main physical and critically symbolic site that would host The Bulgarian Pavilion. The passionately contentious Mausoleum and its subsequent destruction serve here as a powerful symbol for the sudden estrangement in the relationship between art and power in Bulgaria since the Transition.

After all the years in which the arts[20] were of primary importance for the Bulgarian State's propaganda machine, the Transition was a rude awakening. The new Demo-Capitalist State dismissed art as a tool for effective propaganda and has been largely indifferent to art as a form of social critique. Though liberated from the State's overbearing tutelage, without state support compounded with an absent art market, contemporary artists found themselves in a cultural limbo, at least financially speaking. They also viewed themselves as being at a distance from the major developments of Modernism and the Avant-garde that had taken place in the West. The minimal and incidental Bulgarian representation at the Biennale served only to underscore this perception.

The curators' choice of the former site of the Mausoleum strikes us as particularly poignant, as by doing so, they symbolically link together multiple layers of a multitude of voids, blanks and non-spaces that they feel characterise the Bulgarian field of contemporary art, both nationally and how it relates to the international art market. This sedimentation of absences is echoed by the pointless and ineffective erasure of the Mausoleum. Thus, by the act of demolishing the Mausoleum, the powers that be had, in fact, ensured its survival, if only as an indelible after-image that has refused to disappear.

Unlike the eerily absent Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov, the fate of at least one of Bulgaria's monuments has finally caught the attention of the world at large. A masterpiece of architecture, engineering and art, this spherical structure is an epitome of Bulgaria's socialist heritage, if not European architectural patrimony. We are speaking here, of course, about the Buzludzha monument that we started this essay with. At 1441 metres, Buzludzha overlooks a largely empty countryside and appears to defy gravity. This extra-terrestial aspect takes center-stage in the work of the prolific duo Missirkov/Bogdanov. Part of the same series Weekend 2126 that imagined Plovdiv's Bratska Mogila as a futuristic temple-like structure, the artists now turn their attention to this Brutalist, retro-futurist, flying saucer.

We conclude this essay by returning to the question that we posed at the 'beginning' of the text. Why is it that Bulgarian contemporary artists so often feel the need to deal with their country's monumental heritage or, indeed, propose alternative forms of memorialisation and monumentalism? For although we are by no means art historians and are relatively unversed in Bulgarian art history in the broader sense, we do think that Bulgarian monumental heritage is a crucial theme that Bulgarian artists are generally very well aware of, if not – as we've seen above – actively deal with.

Being extremely visible and visibly deliberate manifestations of biased historical narratives, monuments possess an inherent gravitational pull for those criticasters who feel the urgency to confront fundamental and controversial aspects of society, such as history, communal memory, identity, morality, religiosity, power, economy, corruption and so on. This one-sided partisan rhetoric comes into sharp relief when a society goes through the upheavals of a major socio-political transition, such as Bulgaria has experienced. Most monuments, the world over, make universal claims of heroism, victimhood and their respective glorification. Socialist monuments in particular, are notable for their penchant for not only eulogising the (or Socialism's) past, but also glorifying the present and harbouring innate promises of a fantastical (and Communist) future. As the failure of these narratives became apparent, and especially as the historical period that they represent is still so very near, these monuments have become extremely legible and readily available objects for contemporary artists to project their critique onto. Their very prominence, both physically and symbolically, implicitly encourages artists to confront both their form, and more importantly, what they stand for.

At the same time, perhaps because of Bulgarian Socialism's sudden insolvency and the relatively sudden tectonic shift of Bulgaria's economic, political and, indeed, social structures, Bulgarian artists have tried to make sense of this bankruptcy of grand narratives and the volatility that social and national identity has been subject to. Meanwhile, Bulgarian society itself, struggling to succeed in a chaotically competitive, Demo-Capitalist environment, seems to have largely tried to ignore its recent history. Whether by actively agitating for the erasure of the most conspicuous symbols of an inconveniently recent past, or merely by letting them slide into negligent oblivion, Bulgarian society seems to have taken the road of indifference and communal amnesia. Bulgaria's contemporary artists, however, aren't letting their society off the hook any time soon, it seems. The projects and pieces that are dedicated to dealing with the physical markers of Bulgaria's history (whether Socialist or other) seem intent on remembering and acknowledging this past, as difficult as it may be. They believe that the only chance for a healthy society, is for that society to squarely face its past, look into the gaping jaws of discomfiting embarrassment and rip the band-aid off the trauma festering below. With their incessant reminding and remembering, via artistic, visual and conceptual language that is projected onto the symbolic canvas of the past, they function as the nations whacky psychologists, albeit with more ironic humour and a creative approach to therapy. As such, Bulgarian contemporary artists seem to have become Bulgaria's historical conscience. Like so many present-day Don Quixotes, Bulgarian artists seem intent on bursting the bubble of complacent forgetfulness. As Bulgarians' urgency to deal with their monumental, and thus historical, legacy leaves much to be desired, Bulgarian artists keep fighting the windmills of memorial numbness.[30]