a project by Krassimir Terziev & Tsvetelina Hristova
script: Tsvetelina Hristova
photography & editing: Krassimir Terziev
with the voice of: Charlotte Smith (english); Nadejda Moskovska (bulgarian)
sound recording: Zero Project Studio; Kamen Starchev
Coproduced by Doza Gallery
The project is realised with the financial support of National Culture Fund of Bulgaria
With the support of the University of Southhampton, Winchester School of Art
Filmed in the abandoned Bachinovo Aquapark in Blagoevgrad in 2023
With special thanks to Boris Missirkov, Thomas Kneubühler, Rene Beekman, Ivan Dimitrov
trailer, 2:37 min, HD 1080p, sound
Synopsis
Between 1945 and 1989, the Republic of Bulgaria built new spaces for work and leisure with the determination for a future that never materialized.
Aquapark Bachinovo is one of those spaces. With the fall of communism in 1989, it became part of the transformation of property relations in post-socialist Bulgaria. In 2005, the municipality signed a 30-year concession agreement with a private company. This agreement fueled dreams of prosperity and capital flows. In reality, however, the concession operated under a different logic—one where profit was derived from losses and decay.
In 2017, the park was closed. Over 12 years, the obligations for repairs, investments, and free access had served as a means for accumulating fines that grew exponentially each year. Five years later, after the failed concession, the park still looks as if it was abandoned just yesterday in a panicked escape from an unknown cataclysm, leaving everything behind, scattered all around.
In the architectural environment of our shared life, our fleeting present inscribes itself like shorthand notes onto the materiality of concrete, steel, bricks, and glass. Buildings are the concrete flesh of the shared narrative of coexistence, upon which we trace the marks left by the passage of time, through which we decipher the signs that time exists and recedes into the past. Now, as this structured temporality of functionality has been suspended, time sticks to the walls like mud—heavy and inert. The concrete floor rearranges itself with every step, inscribing all possible times, every memory from every place and moment, all recollections of pleasure and oblivion.
Series of 36 photographs, variable sizes, pigment print on 300g paper
Director's Intent
The approach in this essay film is twofold. Traditionally, in filmmaking, the image moves with the motion of the camera. Here, we try to achieve movement inside the still image in two ways, challenging the stability of the opposition between still images (photography) and moving images (film). We do that, first, by perpetually modifying the properties of the digital image: its hue and saturation and, second, by overemphasising the moment of transition between images through double exposure, creating a disorienting and un-still mutations in the image, where each frame is always in transition between two distinct images. This visual technique correlates with the voice-over narrative, which dwells on the instability of transitions and the mutations of reality, time and space in their aftermath. The voice over is in a similar seamless flux between recording subjective experience and providing sparse insights of the spatial urban setting that is the subject and object of the film. A place that emanates the melancholia of a never ending transitional period between ideologically driven etatism and destructive neoliberal grabs.
Biographies
