Geert Lovink on Thu, 24 Sep 1998 12:17:49 +0100 |
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Syndicate: <nettime> Interview with Luchezar Boyadijev (Sofia) - part II |
Yes, we are worth exploiting! Interview with Luchezar Boyadijev (Sofia) By Geert Lovink Recorded in the Revolting Temporary Media Lab, Manchester/UK September 1, 1998 GL: Could we speak of a Sofia School of Contemporary Art? The title of the recent exhibition in Munich, 'Bulgariaavantgarde', suggests this, so do the texts and the group photo in the catalogue. It seems that this group, this generation presents a coherent picture. LB: It is a group of people that has been working in a parallel way. It consists of people from different generations - artists, curators, art critics and people who are into cultural theory/studies. The activities of this group are centred around the 'Institute of Contemporary Art', a small NGO that did not have an office for a long time, only a rotating computer. Me and Nedko Solakov have being doing contemporary art for the last 7 or 8 years. And then there is this group of younger people who started experimenting with video and recently computer. 'Bulgariaavantgarde, Contending Forces II' has been held at the Kuenstlerwerkstatt Lothringerstrasse in Munich in May 1998. The first event, three years earlier, organised by Haralampi G. Oroschakoff, dealt with the Moscow conceptual school, all the way from Kabakov, Komar and Melamid till Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brener. As a title 'Bulgariaavantgarde', on the other hand, is a compromise. I do not particularly like the term, but it is just a label in order to sell the project to the authorities. We did not want to present any distinct, oppressive identity of ours. We wanted to make clear that we are transparent, open-minded, adaptive to circumstances, ready to enter a dialogue, without having to impose on anybody our complaints and miseries. It turned out to be a space full of light, transparency and air. The most significant, emblematic work was an installation by Pravdoliub Ivanov, consisting of 25 hot-plates on the floor. On each plate there would be a pot of different colour and size. Each morning these pots would be filled up with water. Within an hour, the water starts evaporating and a barely visible steam goes up in the air. But since the hot plates are too small and not strong enough, the water never actually reaches the point of boiling. The title of this work is "Transformation Always Requires Time and Energy." You see something is cooking but nothing is ever cooked. In Germany this made sense. The unification has been going on without any concrete results, like a never ending process. There was very little obvious ideology in this show. GL: This absence of ideology and identity goes well together with the current stagnation and ongoing crisis in Bulgaria. Little development or progress, trapped in the vacuum of permanent restructuring, budget cuts and political malaise. LB: Yes, people lack a perspective on having better lives, production picking up etc. This is not happening. There is a slow process of stabilisation. State finances seem to be alright. Renovation of streets in the centre of Sofia is happening, in part financed by the European Union, in order to beautify the city. But there is always a strange aspect attached to these works. The story goes that the old cobble stones have been sold to the city of Vienna, to give it a more authentic touch, whereby Sofia is getting asphalt. There are signs that police activity is on the rise. Some say, a police state is immanent. If people do not pay attention, it might go that way. But so far it can be interpreted as an attempt to crack down on organised crime. Most obvious is the disappearance of pirated CDs. You do not see them being displayed on the city squares anymore. There still are a lot of Russian pirate CDs on the market. This crackdown was the result of a direct threat of sanctions from the American President Bill Clinton to our president. In a matter of two weeks, Bulgarian CDs just disappeared. Of course you can still get them, but you have to know the right people. This is the age of Multi Group, a financial corporation with offices not only in Bulgaria. The official rumour says that the founding of this group is going back to the money laundering operations with ex-communist party assets at the end of the eighties. There are also other similar companies. Now the government has to deal with these big companies which are controlling big parts of the country on various levels. The previous government of former communists, which is now called the Socialist Party, tried to get back the laundered money of these groups, which are actually Mafia. But they failed. The only thing the new government can do is engage and work with these businessman making it possible for them to re-legitimise their "capital" by bring it back into the country as investments. Like in Russia, the issue now is how to make a historical compromise in order to get the badly needed tax money, in exchange for legitimation and power. So on the whole, we can see a process of adaptation to the so-called European standards. This counts for taxing, the banking system and the newly established border police. Next year we will have a new set of IDs, driver's licences and passports which are made according to EU-standards. There are no concrete plans to do a bit for the membership of the EU and NATO, but they are doing everything possible to make themselves more acceptable. We are all trying to prove to foreign investors and our rich citizens that we are exploit-worthy Europeans. GL: For many, the time of expectations has expired. The standards of living for the majority has been continuously falling down. Will they continue to wait patiently? LB: Concerning rejuvenating, all hope is lost. The majority is now living under the poverty line and fighting for their daily survival. It gets especially tough for the retired people. On the other hand, there is now an entirely new generation which grew up after 1989. They have taken for granted that the situation is chaotic. The father or mother may not have a job. These young people are very inventive. Unfortunately, the government does not know how to support their initiatives. It can only control state affairs. The currency board, which was installed on July 1, 1997 as an agreement between the government and the IMF, has become part of our lives. There are tons of jokes about the visits to Sofia of the representative of the IMF for Bulgaria, miss Ann McGirck. These visits are treated in the media as social events, and not as decisive moments. Nobody ever sees the actual results. You do not see any development. When will the stabilisation ever come to an end? GL: How is the Long Equilibrium being represented in the mass media? What is the response of television? What do your students say about it? LB: My students grew up in the last ten years. They either don't care or have found their niche, working for some private company, doing graphic design, or public relations. A lot of them are looking for ways to study abroad and they might, or might not, come back. Recently, I visited the small village where my father was born, with roots going back five generations. Two hundred meters from the farm is a church from the early 19th Century with a graveyard. Here stands the tombstone for the eight Bulgarian victims of the Titanic catastrophe. They actually came from that village, a story which only became well known after the hype of the Titanic film. They must have been males in their early twenties, Gastarbeiter, making some money to send home. This story relates to this national inferiority complex. Have we given anything to the world? Yes, these victims are a form of giving. Our contribution right now lies in the calamities. It is not as bad as in Albania. It is a specific kind of misery. GL: Here, in Manchester, you are participating in the Virtual Revolution workshop. The revolution is all over, and your installation is also referring to it. You are projecting an image of Lenin, speaking at a gathering... LB: It is a social realist painting from the thirties. I do not even know the name of the colleague-artist. The image probably refers to one of the rallies, just after the revolution, between November 1917 and the early spring of 1918. In the dark gallery space I am capturing the faces of the visitors, pasting them into the mass meeting, using the scheme of police surveillance. There is a digital video camera at the entrance. The faces of the visitors are captured in stop motion and then are processed with two computers in Premier and Photoshop manually. Then they are sent to a third machine which is running a program titled "Revolution.Exe" which I have designed with a programmer in Sofia. This program is actually replacing the faces of the Soviet workers with the faces of visitors to the space and you can see the new faces appear on the wall. It shows that you can be manipulated. I can steal your image and do anything I want with it. I do not want to show that you can time travel and participate in some historical event, that idea has already been overexposed. We have had decades of time to dream what it would be like if I had been there. People really identified themselves with the October revolution. Even I, as a young kid, had those nostalgic dreams of wanting to be a revolutionary, getting involved in conspiracies, the underground. These days the organisation of a revolution is much more complicated. And there are so many different perceptions on these events. It is easier to speak about terrorism. We can never be sure about the revolution. Who is behind it? Events are not limited to a particular place anymore. It is old news and embarrassing for me to say but still many Western intellectuals have such romantic ideas. They have missed 45 years of the discourse, and the experience. It still has not been included. GL: How about technological changes? What do you think of phrases such as biotech or digital revolution? LB: Social revolution is suspect, the digital changes aren't, yet. I still have to experience it. Each one of us, in Bulgaria, have a computer of some kind, a 486 with 16 KB of RAM. Recently we, at the ICA-Sofia, got a Pentium and free Internet access. It is nothing exceptional. Everyone has to wait for his or her turn to use the equipment. Yes, there is some commercial activity, but we are not talking about that here. We are waiting in line to take part in the digital revolution. From our perspective, it is like a flood which has not yet arrived to Bulgaria. GL: Each year, for one semester, you are giving classes at the New Bulgarian University, at the department for media studies. What methods do you use and what are you teaching your students? LB: My course is titled Arts and Media Space. These are young kids, producing for radio and TV stations and/or PR. I am teaching them how to grab attention and what visual language could achieve that goal. Techniques which have been developed by artists, and explain what already has been done. I am aware that they are going to use this mostly for commercial purposes. What I can do is to put it within a social context. What I ask them to do is to design a public relations campaign for something which has an entirely negative image. Take the Mafia. It shows them that design is not an innocent practice. In the end, it has got to do with ethics, not just about the image which is going to bring the profit. These students do not read much, they are practitioners. The only thing I can do is to provoke them. They are surprising me, if I am not precise enough about the carriers of information. This they know, it is part of a game they are playing. Their point of reference is techno music. The Brazilian soap operas are for their parents, they do not care about trash television. They will shape the visual landscape, which is defined now by the interface of the computer. Contemporary art, in this context, offers a strategy, a critical context for their future concepts, which might be lost by now. In the last one and half years it has become obvious that the subject of culture before 1989 was supposedly the worker, which was only a cover for the nomenclatura. The working class was merely a projection screen. That was the addressee of everything. The new subject of culture is the quasi-liberal group of businessman and Mafia people. A person of 30 to 35 years old, who has made fast money through speculation, who is not investing, owning a currency exchange bureau or insurance company. This is being offered in the media as the model to follow. Intellectuals are marginalised. They do not fit into this picture. One of the concerns of intellectuals is, for instance, to not let the former security state apparatus take over, to prevent them from legitimising themselves back into normal life, by being sponsors, for instance, supporting hospitals and museums. Members of this class has gone through a process of money-laundering and have gained a monopoly in certain businesses, lets say cable TV. Many intellectuals are now opposing the government, because an alliance with this Mafia class is just immoral. GL: Last year, you came up with the idea to install a culture board which should take over the bankrupt Bulgarian culture and arts scene. The proposal is there now. What could be the next step? How will people respond to this radical idea to delegate the entire national heritage to a transnational body? Is Bulgaria ready for the final sell out of all its cultural assets? LB: Well, this is a tough one. I think Bulgaria is definitely not ready for the final sell-out. Actually, my perception is that everything else Bulgarians might be readily willing to let go but when it comes down to the so called "precious national heritage"... than they get overly jealous. The point which is hard to grasp for politicians and ordinary people in Bulgaria now is that the main BG cultural assets are not to be found in the past. Of course, there is a lot there but it has been the instrument for ideological manipulations and it has been neglected, in terms of conservation, restoration and scientific research, for such a long time that it is only functional now as a sentimental, nostalgic remedy for diverting attention from the real hardships. People might not give a duck's shit if a whole block of the actually functioning state industry (let's say arms production - not that it is good on moral grounds..., or chemical industry, or the touristic one...) is sold out to private foreign or domestic businessmen under the table and practically for peanuts, but they will kill you if you tell them that the country does not really need and can't really afford to have and keep up another medieval church or a manuscript, let alone a monastery or a Thracian tomb. At the same time a good theatre company, a gallery space or a library might be falling apart. Actors or musicians, etc. might be just starving - no-one cares and I have the feeling that this has to do in part with the old mythology of socialist times according to which the "cultural worker", the creator of art and culture, the intellectual was a divine being (to be bought for an ideological price, of course...). So now, people say - it's just too bad, you had too good, too long... Ergo - sell industry but keep the delusion of the "glorious" past. That's why the proposal for a Culture Board for Bulgaria, "modelled" after the Currency Board introduced in the country by the IMF in 1997. The latter is supposed to control the stabilisation of the country's finances, the former would take care of its cultural stabilisation. The radical aspect is that BG-ians might feel it's OK to let a foreign institution run the country's economy (actually, it's better, they think, this way somebody else is responsible for us and if we fail, there will be a "scape-goat"...), but culture - well, this touches too deep, maybe because it's on the symbolic "front" the Culture Board is most likely to operate. And "symbolic fronts", although bloodless, have seen much more battles, fought for far longer times. Bulgarians have just gotten out of the symbolic battle with the real utopia and they don't need a new one...well, it's just too bad - they have had it too good, for far too long with their cultural heritage, now is the time for some tough waking ups. --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@desk.nl