GOOD MIRRORS ARE NOT CHEAP is a curatorial project discussing ideas of self-perception, representation, desire and nostalgia through the work of five Bulgarian artists.

GMANC is the product of a specific time and space; the offspring of an early summer encounter with the city of Sofia, an incomplete summing-up of the exchanges I –curator in residency who never before travelled to Bulgaria[1]– had with people, topics and places within this geography. Mainly, it is a conversation between myself and the artists I invited to collaborate –and the many more I met on the way–, a mutual mirroring of sorts, but also an open dialogue between us and the suggestions composing the scattered conceptual background of our common endeavour.

GMANC is a group show with the ambition to convert itself into a moment of private, public, hopefully expandable, conviviality.

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*ARRIVAL

  The project borrows its title from the namesake Audre Lorde’s poem, dated 1970. The poem is one sharp example of Lorde’s commitment in inspiring black wo/men to respond radically, disruptively to the racial misrepresentation forced on them by White-dominated mainstream culture. Opposing to the very possibility of delegating representation of self to others, stopping the hand of the dishonest glassmaker, Black communities and individuals can finally get rid of the faulty mirror as well as of the interiorised distorted reflection.

Bringing Lorde to Sofia was a spontaneous exercise. I carried the poem with me, I read it again one night and heard it resonating throughout my meetings with the city the next day. But the focus shifted, the poet’s words now faintly framing the generational struggle of a pretty enclosed artistic milieu. Young practitioners engaged in diverse attempts to break the mirror, or maybe reject its existence altogether.

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*FLIRTATION

  When talking with and about a younger generation of Bulgarian artists, those who either were born after the fall of Berlin’s wall or spent just a short moment of their childhood in socialist times, many things can come to mind as objects of enquiry. It might maybe be appealing to talk about the shift from communist utopia to capitalist realism, from internationalism to globalisation, or about the effects of EU freedom of movement or of low cost flights hitting Bulgarian airports. And how all of this transformed the artistic scene of the country and the lives of those inhabiting it. These surely were issues filling up my luggage, and many of these topics popped up in conversations I had during my stay. However, I was eventually more fascinated by different kinds of recurring ‘obsessions’, which I was recognising in the work of some of the artists I got in deeper connection with. I would call it a certain sense of undirected desire, a never-ending flirtation with professionalism, with a certain extent of theoretical depth, or with the mechanisms governing the art world on the larger European scale. Neither here nor there; I discovered a group of artists who move in absolute independency, only marginally interweaved in an ideological fabric they ironically dismiss. A generation taking back accountability for their own representation. A group/non-group of artists denying glassmakers [like, possibly, myself] the very chance of producing a mirror fitting their own image.

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I use the term ‘flirtation’. Flirting can be a pretty solipsistic activity. Although requiring at least the responsive presence of somebody/something else, flirtation is mostly a self-referred practice. We project a certain idea of ourselves on others, and the effect of this communication process is the temporary elation given by having made ourselves perceived the way we intended to. A flirtatious-being embodies their own desire, turning themself into both subject and object at once. The kind of flirtation I met in Sofia was maybe the antidote, or the more immediate reaction to тъга [tuga], that ungraspable nostalgic feeling described by writer Georgi Gospodinov as “[the] longing for something that hasn’t happened… a sudden realization that life is slipping away and that certain things will never happen to you, for a whole list of reasons—personal, geographical, political”[2]. A compliant sorrow in which visions of personal and collective, past and future collide, a diluted sentiment that has deep roots in the way Bulgaria dealt with its complex history, mostly by measure of erasure and negation.

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