A Secret Room – Final exhibition of The Price of Freedom and Democracy project. Opening on 26 April at 19:30, RCCA “Toplocentrala” / Small Format Space.
The exhibition will be opened for visitors from 26 April to 25 May 2022
Creative team of the exhibition:
- Albena Baeva – curator, artist, producer
- Petya Boyukova – exhibition design
- Neda Sokolovska – director, workshop host
- Aleksandar Mihaylov – camera, photography
- Blagovest Dimitrov – sound operator
The exhibition A Secret Room is a contemporary approach of bringing together documents, videos and results from the workshops of The Price of Freedom and Democracy international project.
It focuses on the themes of democracy, the victims of the Socialist regime, and the trauma of transition through the means of verbatim and forum theatre workshops targeted to young people from Bulgaria, Germany, Poland, Romania, Lithuania and the Czech Republic.
The exhibition brings to the fore young people’s experience from their encounter with history. They were born and raised in a democracy and have never come into personal contact with the transition period, however, they can still co-experience it from a distance. Today, it seems increasingly urgent to open the door to the recent past and reassess, beyond nostalgia, the privileges earned and the moments missed.
The mobile phone, as the main tool of experiencing reality in the present day, becomes a viewing tool for the exhibition. The QR codes located in the external space of Toplocentrala lead the visitors to videos of the workshop participants from Bulgaria. The small exhibition hall in Toplocentrala transforms into a secret room, where long ago someone may have secretly listened to the Beatles.
The project overall has an international dimension, with a different subject assigned to every workshop. In Bulgaria, the director Neda Sokolovska together with the participants were out in the streets collecting interviews and memories of the daily harassment and restrictions imposed by the authorities on the appearance, clothing, hairstyles and behaviour of the young people before 1989.
The partners from Lithuania chose to present a contemporary interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play which Lithuanian directors used to oppose the regime. In Poland, the workshop participants relived the persecution of dissidents, while in the Czech Republic they created a situation of a clash between the stereotypes of the youth’s past and its living witnesses. Each individual project has addressed a particular aspect of the problems of the political regime in the Eastern Bloc. Shown together, they are a sublimation of the nuanced narrative of the transition and our shared history.