The Neighbours

60th Venice Biennale, Bulgarian Pavilion (2024)

Curated by Vasil Vladimirov

Princeton University (2023)

Interdisciplinary Humanities Doctoral Program

University of Toronto (2023)

Curated by Vasil Vladimirov

Structura Gallery (2023)

Curated by Gregor Jansen

Studio the Neighbours / Sofia City Gallery (2022)

Curated by Vessela Nozharova / Krasimir Iliev

The Neighbours is a multimedia installation about how we remember, carry and forget trauma. The exhibition excavates the silenced memories of survivors of state violence from Bulgaria’s socialist era (1945-1989) and explores its troubling legacy in the present.

During this period, countless individuals were sent to forced labour camps without trial, faced imprisonment, systematic persecution, forced resettlement and ethnic assimilation–political dissidents, peasants who refused to give up their land, artists, queer people, Muslim minorities and everyday people who defied the regime’s ideology.

Drawing from extensive scholarly research, more than 40 interviews were conducted by the project’s creators.This multidisciplinary study reimagines the survivors’ domestic environments—the very spaces where these interviews took place. Through the interplay of video projections, ambient sounds, and artefacts recovered from the former sites of violence, the installation visually juxtaposes the camps’ material world with the space of the home, evoking how traumatic memories permeate daily life while inviting the audience to bear witness.

Created by a team of artist-researchers working between the archive, the ethnographic encounter and the studio, The Neighbours unsettles the distinction between scholars and artists. It portrays the role of art in tying together knowledge production with the ability to capture affect–something that often cannot be directly documented or made present.

By bearing witness, viewers engage in a symbolic act, recognising the importance of testimonies in shaping historical narratives and collective memory—sometimes against the grain of historiographies that question
their status as evidence. The installation offers a way of confronting and working with denied histories, cultures of silence, purged archives, and histories subjected to both past and contemporary political pressure. In so doing, The Neighbours challenges prevailing narratives and takes a vital role in unsilencing.

The installation spans three rooms, reflecting three ways of remembering the lived experience of state violence. It is based on a theoretical framework developed from the interviews of survivors conducted by the collective.

In the living room are the voices of those who remember and have been vocal about their experiences both in the public and private spheres.

The bedroom holds the words of the survivors who speak for the first time about their experiences—those who had previously been reluctant to speak out of fear, or simply because they had never been asked.

The kitchen embodies the wordless laments of people who could not speak — those who perished, those whose memories had been lost, and the details of their experiences permanently silenced.

Project Team

Julian Chehirian is an artist and a PhD candidate in the History of Science at Princeton University. In his practice-based research he develops installations in dialogue with archival and ethnographic research. These spaces stage entangled relationships between history, psychology and material culture. His dissertation project traces how experimental visual practitioners across the 20th century arts and sciences mobilized aesthetic inquiry towards a radical re-framing of what counts as knowledge. Previously a Fulbright researcher in Bulgaria, his exhibition “Excavating the Psyche” (Red House, Sofia, 2015) offered a survey of the history of psychotherapy during socialism. His scholarly writing appears in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, and in edited collections for Columbia University Press, Bloomsbury, and the Center for Advanced Study Sofia.

Lilia Topouzova is an Assistant Professor of History and Creative Nonfiction at the University of Toronto where she is also Director of the Professional Writing and Communication Program. She is a scholar and a documentary filmmaker whose interdisciplinary work explores the relationship between remembering and forgetting. Her academic research on the silenced trauma of the Bulgarian gulag appears in the American Historical Review, Gender & History, The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place, and in the Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice. For her writing on scholarship as a critical media arts practice see, Journal of Visual Literacy. She is the scriptwriter of the documentary films The Mosquito Problem & Other Stories (2007) and Saturnia (2012), which she also directed. Dr. Topouzova held fellowships at Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung – ZZF in Germany (2013), Brown University in the US (2014), York University in Canada (2015),the Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling in Concordia University in Canada (2017), and at the Centre for Advanced Study in Sofia in Bulgaria (2022). Her work has been supported by, among others, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Krasimira Butseva is a visual artist, researcher and educator. In her work, she investigates human rights violations, political violence, traumatic memory and official and unofficial histories in the context of Eastern Europe. She is a lecturer at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. In addition, she is the awardee of BAZA (2022), and has been an artist fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2021). Her work has been exhibited at Sofia History Museum, Sofia (2020); Seen Fifteen Gallery, London (2020); District Six Museum, Cape Town/South Africa (2019); Phoenix Art Space, Brighton/UK (2018); Four Corners Gallery London (2017) and Pingyao International Photography Festival, Pingyao/China (2016). Krasimira’s articles Vernacular Memorial Museums: Memory, Trauma and Healing in Post-Communist Bulgaria was recently published in the Museums & Social Issues Journal.

Jorge Rubiera is a Cuban-American filmmaker. He initially got his start as a musician, recording and touring as a drummer. Over the past two decades, he has written and directed over a dozen narrative and documentary shorts, including Birdwatchers for the 2011 Borscht film festival.

 As cinematographer and editor he’s made over a dozen more films, including the Emmy award winning “Hecho a Mano”, and the Telly Award winning “All-American Cuban Comet” for ESPN. In addition to being a longstanding collaborator on “The Neighbours”, Jorge is working on a documentary film that follows its creation.

Martin Atanasov is a visual artist working in Sofia. He studied photography at the Film Academy in Prague (FAMU). He orients his practice around the design and creation of photographic books. Over the past years he has developed and participated in various collaborative projects connected with photography, book making and visual anthropology. Martin developed the visual identity of The Neighbours, designing the exhibition book, facade billboards, posters and printed exhibition materials.