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OCCASIONAL CAMPING (residency) 

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November 2022/ PISTOLET GALLERY/ ReBonkers/ Varna, Bulgaria

15 – 27.11.2022 open gates
Visits between 13 and 15 h by appointment with our assistant Kalina Zhecheva: kalina.zhecheva@gmail.com

26.11 – 5.12.2022 Occasional Camping Replayed

Multimedia installation with documentation from the camping ReBonkers, 4 Baruten Pogreb Str, www.rebonkers.com open Monday to Saturday, 16 – 20 h.

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The project OCCASIONAL CAMPING situates artists from Bulgaria and abroad in an occasional, most ordinary panel apartment in Varna, located strategically between 3 industrial zones, a cemetery and a prison.
The process of conceptualizing/romanticizing of the ordinary, the industrial and the subcultural in the context of the hugely charged symbol that is the sea, reveals a face of Varna which, alien to the touristic context, is inevitably present, capturing the history of modernity – from the multicultural base remaining of the Ottoman Empire, through the gigantic leap towards europeization of royal Bulgaria, including early industrialization, academic development of economic science, organizing of industrial fairs, through the heavy industrialization and urbanization of communism that grouped monumental constructs of human destinies into peripheral districts. The industry and the sea are connected inevitably in a joint organism that defines the existence of everything else – the everyday regime of work and rest, Vaptsarov, the ghetto rapper, the restaurant singer, the last punk; the weird people and sailors who import illegally music during communism; the artists who, again during communism, paint industrial landscapes (first of which is the Varna-born Maria Stolarova) in a fugitive attempt towards the “decadent formalism” of cubism, minimalism and abstraction. These layers of industrial and subcultural experience are the matter that makes Varna a big and global city with its unlit and doubting modes of existence.

Researching and experiencing the environment of the apartment, its surroundings and the sea, the artists build their own way of inhabiting the city as an ultimate mode of existence. They put their aesthetical sign, lost in the memory of the city. Nowadays the sea of Varna is shared with war, whose pieces float with the sea currents. The refugees of war, like the artists of the occasional camping, are out of the window display and inhabit temporarily the same class of occasional habitation. This fact of life inevitably leaves its nuance on an occasional camping.

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http://www.occasionalcamping.eskimogroup.org

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