The Neighbours: Forms of Trauma (1945-1989)

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 (Kunsthalle Düsseldorf)

Studio the Neighbours / Sofia City Gallery (2022)

Curated by Vessela Nozharova / Krasimir Iliev

The Neighbours was born in 2022 as a temporary museum arranged across two sites—the Sofia City Gallery and a soon-to-be demolished printing house on Benkovski st №40. The project is the outcome of 20 years of scholarly research and 9 years of artistic collaboration. Through object, video and sound interventions, Julian Chehirian, Krasimira Butseva and Lilia Topouzova composed spaces for bearing witness to silenced trauma built upon 40 interviews conducted by the authors (2002-2022) with survivors of political repressions and forced labor.

Across the marbled floors of a State art institution and the tightly laid parquet of a decommissioned socialist-era printing house, survivors and ethnographers in conversation surfaced repressed memories of the Bulgarian Gulag. While one space emphasized the public liquidation of documentary evidence by the State, the other situated post-traumatic memory in the private sphere—showing that the memory lives behind closed doors, in everyday spaces.

At Benkovski st №40, the artists’ former studio, three domestic environments evoked the material and psychological spaces where their interviews took place. A living room, a bedroom and a kitchen rendered three distinct forms of remembering and forgetting. Fragments from interviews air amidst physical and cinematic shards of the former camp topographies, and field recordings sonorized through domestic materiality. The multimedia conflux characterizes the unstable boundaries between spaces of home and distant sites of violence that remain proximate in mind. The authors invite us to listen with their listening—to attend to an unsettled past.

The City Gallery site took a divergent approach, evoking the documentary annihilation of this same past by the state, and probing its reticence to form an official narrative concerning these events. It offers a new historical and affective account of the Bulgarian Gulag through three installations spanning literature, film and sound.

The Neighbours reimagines the capacities of space as a conveyor of collective social inheritance and a facilitator of social healing. It is accompanied by a program of discussions, artist talks, educational tours and a workshop taking place in other locations, and involving external artists and scholars.

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.