Award - Winning
Photography Project: 
AMNESIA

Series 'Amnesia' are International Photography Award Winner, Architecture 1st Place / Discovery of the Year 2010

The celebration of an anniversary always raises questions about the past, present and the future.

That cliché: "A nation which does not respect its past, can not respect its present “ is the truth, unfortunately. In Bulgaria, there are more than 150 monuments built in the period 1945 - 1989 by the Bulgarian Communist Government.

In one month, I visited some of the most significant monuments and memorial complexes on the territory of Bulgaria.
Most of the monuments, dedicated to the Soviet Army and the Communist rebellion. Another part is in devotion to our nation. Some have been taken down to pieces by bombs and fire guns.

Used to be front-and-center, giant remnants stand out still spectral but ownerless and invisible. Today, the nation is forgetfulness.

No evidence of maintenance…No evidence of memory... I saw them…

Through out my photography, I invite viewers to look selectively and to participate in their own way. No need to follow any chronology and fixed order. Shooting and documenting what I see, raw and real, without getting involvled in a very personal way. But in the proccess of my trip I went beyond documentary photography, through all this and more: real and imagined, brutality and tenderness, amnesia and rememberness, man and women, love and hate, in and out, dark and light, close and very further. I saw my country as a no man's land. The narrative is open and it is encouraging the viewer to link the collective series/sets together, pieceing together elements of a larger story, the story of Bulgarian forgotten past and its present Post-Soviet reality.

In a time of reversal of values and political corruption we pretend to remember the past but we don’t.

…Amnesia…

In Collaboration with Travis Durden

Pantheon Buzludja, 1981, height: 70m 

Built in memory of two heroic epochs: 1878 - Liberation of Bulgaria after 5 century slavery and 1944 - antifascism victory. The House Monument of Bulgarian Communist Party is the biggest ideological monument in Bulgaria. It is located on the mount Buzludja (1441m) in the Balkan Mountain. 16 million leva (8 million euro) were collected from the nation as ”donations” for constructing the monument. 

Today:

Pantheon Buzludja: Then and Now

Other abandoned monuments on the territory of Bulgaria