Staro Zhelezare 2016

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.

“The Village of Personalities”

“Reconstruction of a Bulgarian Village 2016/ Art for social change”

PCCA / PIRIANKOV CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, STARO ZHELEZARE
curators: Katarzyna i Ventzislav Piriankov
Artists: Julia Szwerkolt, Marta Hirschfeld, Maria Magas, Joanna Kończewska, Zuzanna Mila, Victoriya Pidgurska, Mieszko Dobek, Magdalena Szymkowska, Kacper Ławniczek, Katarzyna i Ventzislav Piriankov.

A festival celebrating tolerance, multiculturalism, migration, metamorphosis, and other possible realities.
This summer the artistic program of the Center for Contemporary Art in the Bulgarian village of Staro Zhelezare takes the form of a mural festival for the second time. The slogan of this year's edition is the "Village of Personalities / Art for social change" and is the continuation of the 2013 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. This month-long 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 Bulgaria and Einstein are transported to the present only to find a cart pulled by a donkey, naturally. There are also Gandhi i Fidel Castro, who  in fact visited the village in 70-s together with Todor Zhivkov.

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.

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

Shor

Piriankov Center for Contemporary Art is created and run by Piryankov Art Collective - Katarzyna and Ventsislav Piriankov, in Old Iron Village (Staro Zhelezare) in central Bulgaria.
Their art projects are influenced by multiculture mixture of Central-Eastern Europe. Ventsislav comes from Bulgaria, Katarzyna is Polish, they both live and work in Poland and summer-time in Bulgaria.
Both in Poland (Poznan) and Bulgaria (Staro Zhelezare) they established Art Centers creating their character contextually to the place, and on the basis of their multiculture experience.
The PCCA is based in the heart of Europe's rural exotic - small Bulgarian village all consisted of houses built of adobe (mud bricks). The PCCA is also seated in such a building, belonged to the ancestors of Piryankovs. It is placed in the real center of Thracian valley and is surrounded by plenty of tumuluses with ancient tombs and temples. The artists were inspired by the occasion of culture impact of contemporary art on village society grown on ancient roots and traditions, and wide possibilities this mixture can provoke and create.