when you left, did you think you’d come back? / 2024
moving image & sound installationin collaboration with Martin Atanasov
a commission & solo exhibition at Goethe Institut Sofia, Bulgaria
Commissioned and invited by Goethe Institute to develop a body of work reflecting on the migration of Bulgarian citizens to Germany, in June 2024, the artists Martin Atanasov & Krasimira Butseva and the sociologist Marina Lyakova spent a week in Frankfurt. There they collected
oral histories of individuals who have moved to Germany in the past three decades. The collected audio and visual fragments were shown in the exhibition “When you left, did you think you’d come back?” which points to the lives of Bulgarians in Germany: ethnic Bulgarians, Bulgarian Turks and Bulgarian Roma.
The conversations moved from the departure, arrival and adaptation to the ways of navigating German culture, language, daily life, bureaucracy and the state. Some of the recurring themes emerging were on equality, racism, class and labour, rights and development, struggle and precarity and integration.
The voices heard in the Goethe Institut Gallery belong to people who migrated to Germany after Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007. Parts of their individual stories, as well as broader, collective narratives of migration are visually recounted in the film included in the exhibition.
The show is the result of a project “Bulgarian Migration in Germany – Social Worlds and Artistic Re-interpretation.”