2015, was the first year of StreetArt Festival under
the name “Village of Personalities / Art for social change”. For the first time
we invited 10 young artists from Poland, who were students of our School of
Drawing in Poznan. It was well organised team, prepared yet in Poland for the
project. Whole July almost every day young people were present on the village
streets and painted. The reaction was fantastic. Village space is quite big,
but the result was quite visible. It was undoubtly the beginning of Staro
Zhelezare new era.
In 2016 we repeated the scheme, took the new Polish
team and continued what we began, to saturate the village space. Meanwhile
Staro Zhelezare became famous in Bulgaria, our big surprise was the interest
from The New York Times, whose reporter personally visited the place and wrote
the article.
A Bulgarian village becomes a work of art.
Thus arises the project "VILLAGE – A WORK OF ART". The idea behind the project is to transform the entire village into an immense work of art. "The Village of Personalities" - local heroes, or simply residents, are immortalized on the walls of homes in the company of invited prominent figures from the world of politics, culture and other public spheres. Homeowners are depicted with such personalities as Pope Francis, Queen Elizabeth II, Albert Einstein, the Dalai Lama, Margaret Thatcher, Barack Obama, Fidel Castro, Tsar Boris III, Boyko Borisov, and Hristo Stoichkov.
“The Village of Personalities”
“Reconstruction of a Bulgarian Village / Art for social change”
“Reconstruction of a Bulgarian Village / Art for social change”
A festival celebrating tolerance,
multiculturalism, migration, metamorphosis, and other possible realities.
The slogan of this year's edition is the "Village of
Personalities / Art for social change" and is the continuation of the 2014
project "Revitalization of the Bulgarian Village". This time the
artistic duo Katarzyna and Ventzislav Piriankov, together with an invited group
of young Polish artists, are creating murals on the walls and houses of
Piriankov’s ancestral village throughout July. Celebration of
art both embraces and is embraced by the entire village transforming it into a
venue of intensive, rapid global migration on both the real and symbolic level.
This is mainly due to the form that the works of art take – murals. Seemingly
absurd contact between distant worlds and remote cultures proves to be suddenly
possible. The artificial distance is erased between the village granny and
Queen Elizabeth or the local Gypsy and Barack Obama, while Boris III, Tsar of
Russia and Einstein are transported to the present only to find a cart pulled
by a donkey, naturally.
We are all
descendants of immigrants seeking happiness – people have moved around forever.
Contrary to appearances, this remote village, which seems to be at the end of
the world, has always typified a symbolic and authentic cultural melting pot. Orthodox
Christians, Jews, Catholics, descendants of the Thracians, Armenians and
Gypsies all coexisted in the natural setting. This seething multicultural
mélange is being stirred today as we once again find ourselves in an era of
heightened mobility of not only people but also ideas and symbols.
This year, we look at two interrelated effects
of this migration: the potential of global exchange and the search for
identity. They find expression in the treatment of cultural traditions from all
over the world. Boundaries and distance are being erased and thanks to
unlimited access to a stream of inspiration mostly from media such as the
Internet. The free flow of cultures bears fascinating and surprising fruit.
In this way
Staro Zhelezare is being transformed into a unique village in the heart of the
Balkans where the walls and houses display world-renowned personalities in the
company of local heroes, otherwise known as regular, every day residents. These
encounters typically take the form of amicable meetings for quiet, reflective exchanges
of views. What do the subjects communicate to each other? What can be learnt?
That we can only possibly guess as it is the element of surprise found in the
sight of the collision of distant worlds which opens new areas of reflection.
The meeting of separate cultures at the individual level touches upon what we
are in fact looking for… authenticity and the essence of our times.
And this
authenticity, as in Roland Topor's surrealistic stories, can be more easily and
accurately found in the situation's absurdity which best corresponds to reality.
One may trace in the murals what is so often sought in our prosaic lives: the
miraculous, or the poetry of everyday life, offering a mystery revealed to few,
and escape from fate. The characters bridge the geographic and cultural divide
between the village and faraway lands which are seemingly beyond the outline of
the world map. Such personalities meet outside of their own realms, as in a
fairy tale, a philosophical fable, or one’s own unbridled imagination. They try
to dodge destiny through these extraordinary discussions to solve life’s
puzzles. Sitting on the roadside benches in a neighborly fashion participating
in waiting for Godot, taking root and seemingly transforming and undergoing an
almost Kafkaesque metamorphosis. In this fashion they learn how not to
distinguish fiction from the truth... The key theme here is that thanks to the
use of absurdly associated images and through the phantasmagorical realm
imposed on the map of a Bulgarian village we can experience the essence of our
times.
Katarzyna Piriankov
