the neighbours / 2019-2024

multimedia installation
in collaboration with Lilia Topouzova & Julian Chehirian

The Neighbours, Bulgarian Pavilion, 60th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2024

The Neighbours, Bulgarian Pavilion, 60th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2024

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.

The Neighbours: Forms of Trauma (1945-1989), Studio Benkovski 40, Sofia, 2022

The Neighbours: Forms of Trauma (1945-1989), Studio Benkovski 40, Sofia, 2022

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.

The neighbours: Forms of Trauma (1945-1989), University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada 2023

The Neighbours: Forms of Trauma (1945-1989), Studio Benkovski 40, Sofia, 2022

The Neighbours, Bulgarian Pavilion, 60th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2024

The Neighbours, Bulgarian Pavilion, 60th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2024

“The greatest revelation was a remote pavilion on the water’s edge opposite Giudecca, where artists and historians have found a way to bring forth a hidden chapter of Bulgaria’s past. The scene is a dim house of battered chairs, truckle beds and old cabinets, their drawers filled with earth and lichen, as if the outside had somehow got inside. Images of dark forests and rivers flicker intermittently across the furniture, from which voices sporadically emit. Have you somehow activated them yourself?

What you hear is the testimony of the last survivors of a communist forced labour camp on a Bulgarian island that only closed in 1989. Every pause, every word and breath is absolutely vital. You are intimately drawn into the knowledge of it all through the material scene around you – the scent and touch of each object, the straining to hear every quiet voice, the shifting light. This is the most delicate and elegiac expression of a terrible history.”

- Laura Cumming
Art Critic for The Observer & The Guardian

The Neighbours, Bulgarian Pavilion, 60th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2024

“A recreation of a Soviet-era apartment in Bulgaria, assembled using found objects, is the setting for this astonishing pavilion. While the world-making is faultless, including the dog-eared copy of Chekhov on the living-room bookshelf and the cigarette in the ashtray, this tenebrous installation is brought to life by a soundtrack of interviews with Soviet state prisoners who were incarcerated in labour camps and prison camps. Assembled over 20 years, the interviews recount life in the prisons and what it was like for the inmates to be stared at or shunned by their communities while being transported from prison to prison, treated as foreigners by their own countrymen. Yet as you draw closer to the kitchen, where dishes and a cylindrical grater stand frozen in the sink, a sense of silence clings to the installation. It contains memories, but whose exactly? The voices represent one set of memories but there are others that might never be told.”

- Edward Behrens,
Editor of Apollo Magazine

The Neighbours, Bulgarian Pavilion, 60th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2024

“We head to the last room, a spatial projection screen, an installation by Krasimira Butseva with Julian Chehirian and Lilia Topouzova. This installation proposes a traumatic space, dealing with absence and traces of human presence. The furniture and all objects typical of a communist-era house are erased in white; flickering projections show details of distant rooms, all empty and immobile, while sounds of birds, water and moving plates fill the space. This space explores ideas of silence, memory, trauma, and the aftermath of the political violence that took place in Bulgaria between 1946 and 1989, based on oral interviews with survivors of political repression from forced labor camps (created from 2002-2022). In the end we realize that it is (as in the parcours of the exhibition) only the beginning of a story that will be told to us only if we ask, ask the right questions, put an imaginary mirror in front of us, and have this to tell, against the ego and above all against forgetting.”

- Dr. Gregor Jansen
Director of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf,

Art Historian, Curator & Critic

The Neighbours, Bulgarian Pavilion, 60th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2024

“The Bulgarian pavilion recreates a darkened apartment from the country’s Communist era to tell the stories of survivors of political violence. Different elements are activated sporadically throughout the domestic setting: a record player blares before swiftly switching off, bird song plays in the background, lights flicker ominously over a straw bed, a sewing machine suddenly whirrs into life, making visitors jump.

But it is the voices calmly retelling stories that allow us to understand what we are experiencing: one man recounts being forced to change names, of being beaten; a woman’s voice from elsewhere in the room speaks of her surprise at the silence of others in the face of evil. The voices we hear are the result of more than 40 interviews with survivors but there are also sections in the work that represent those who cannot or do not speak of these memories. These are even more chilling. It is certainly not a depressing installation though; there is a certain beauty to bearing witness to these voices finally being heard.”

- Louisa Buck
Art Critic and Contemporary Art Correspondent
for The Art Newspaper

The neighbours: scaffolding of intimacy, Structura Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria, 2023

Video documentation:

The Neighbours @ Venice Biennale, 2024
https://youtu.be/I_1E_-owo58

The Neighbours @ Toronto, 2023
https://youtu.be/HTh5Kuq7sNc

The Neighbours @ Sofia, 2022
https://youtu.be/h6kpD0WoTpk

Trailer of the documentary film “The Neighbours” by Jorge Rubiera:
https://vimeo.com/875258463

Press coverage:

https://theneighbours.org/press

the neighbours: scaffolding of intimacy, structura gallery, sofia, 2023

Exhibited at

Acqua Alta, Plovdiv City Gallery, Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 2024
Curators: Svetlana Kuyumdzhieva & Plamen Petrov

Bulgarian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2024
curator: Vasil Vladimirov

University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, 2023
curator: Vasil Vladimirov

Structura Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria, 2023
curator: Dr. Gregor Jansen

Studio Benkovski 40, Sofia, Bulgaria, 2022
curator: Vessela Nozharova

Sofia City Art Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria, 2022
curator: Krassimir Iliev

* Awarded with the People’s Choice Award of
the Toronto City Council Heritage Award 2024

Funded by: The Department of History, IHUM, and the Humanities Council at Princeton University,
University of Toronto and the Ministry of Culture of Bulgaria.

Photography (Structura Gallery): Lubov Cheresh
Videography: Jorge Rubiera

The installation has been supported by Princeton University, University of Toronto, London College of Communication and the Ministry of Culture of Bulgaria.

krasimira butseva