Today, we conclude our last public event for the year. Exhibitions turned out very fruitful about contacts with new people who are interested in the topics and needs we are preoccupied with.

Unfortunately, the gallery guys didn’t want us to be in their way and we couldn’t really meet our visitors but on Friday I decided to persist. For 3 hours I met a retired teacher who worked 20 years in a kindergarten in Stolipinovo, a young couple from the Stolipinovo who were really keen to get involved in initiatives with arts and culture in their community, and a recent young teacher in a minority school in Sofia who is trying to break out of the traditional system and invited us to help her with new initiatives for her students there.

Interestingly, both the local couple and the retired Bulgarian teacher made a similar point to me, maybe influenced by our Vol. 4 exhibit. They shared stories about how people in the neighbourhood always try to do something nice for you. The teacher told me how she noticed that when she was getting a coffee on the street in Stolipinovo, the person always put for her half a spoon more ground coffee. When she thanked for that, the woman said “Of course – for the mualima! Now you are going to teach our kids whole day!”

(I happen to know from Arabic that “mualimah” means “teacher”.)

Here is the 4th volume of Duvarmuzei – a new addition to the Plovdiv exhibition which you didn’t have the opportunity to see in Sofia.

Last evening we were setting up the poster-monuments “Allah razı olsun” at five sites in the neighborhood, with the help of a number of friends. These are memorials for the community’s achievements this spring when tens of grassroots initiatives helped with food those families which didn’t have any left.

The preliminary conversations about the setting up of the posters, and more generally, about the point of art and art-interventions, became the focal point of many new acquaintances and maybe emerging partnerships for our initiatives in Stolipinovo? They begin with a minute of silence after we explain our poster intentions, then followed by “It is very good what you are doing!”, and then sometimes with “What do you think about this idea I’ve had…”?

For example, with owner/manager of the covered market in Stolipinovo, we came up with the idea for a drop-in office there of the Filibeliler media, for those without internet who want to submit signals and news proposals to the “neighbourhood’s newspaper”. So, with the last bits of Duvarmuzei’s budget I printed out a sign for the office and a week later we put it up just next to the guy’s “Balkan Grill” one. 😉

The exhibition in Sofia is a sort of retrospective, but we are showing also entirely new work from just this month! One example is the intervention Duvarmuseum Vol. 3: “Stolipinovo Cleaning Agency”. Can you guess what is it about?

And here is the answer to the orange puzzle from two weeks ago: an attempt to bring recognition to the lads that collect everyone’s household bins for a 0,50 lv fee. They cover the entire district, yet for an outsider are very difficult to locate, always on the move. For a few weeks of frequent visits, I got to talk to four of them and supply seven with personalised (un)official work clothes (for some i managed to meet only their parents).

It was a great joy! And a bit of complaining that the letters were not all capitals.

On the 29th, Tuesday, we open our first exhibition in Sofia, invited by Goethe-Institut Bulgarien!

You are welcome from 17:30 on and do bring your masks. There will be no speeches this time but we will be around and available for a chat (and later for a drink).

We will show something from all our projects since 2018 till now – Plias, Listen Now Son, The Beauty We Share, Duvarmuseum Vol. 1 – as well as the newest initiatives, part of Duvarmuseum, which are being cooked in this very moment!

Our humble online shop has been launched! Be the first to buy something from “Fashion House Karashik”, and plant the seeds for it to flourish. All items are made by people in Stolipinovo. 

With lots of sweat and effort Yanka and me, with the help of B., managed to compose an invitation in Turkish for the opening of our exhibition tomorrow, Duvarmuzei Vol.1: “Hand-made”. We made it in the local dialect, milletçi, so Yanka’s fellow neighbours can easily understand it.

It was a complex process! I was explaining what it is all about. How could Yanka imagine her addressing some people she’s never met and doesn’t know?
“Aha”, said she, “this is like an açılişıma, like when you start a new shop of yours!” Then we set out on figuring out what is the Bulgarian word for that açılişıma thing. We found it – “opening”.

The next steps to decide were what should she tell those unfamiliars? Suddenly all these things seemed to me very fuzzy and unclear, and I didn’t know either how to explain them to Yanka!
But she was getting inspired, “Yes, yes, yes, how it is ‘all’ this, how ‘the whole’…” – sometimes she didn’t know the words to put to meanings, in either language. She described them to me in a roundabout way as abstract processes, so that we can find the name for them.

After that we needed to turn it into Turkish. However, Yanka could write only with Bulgarian letters – that’s what she had learned in her six years of school long ago. For this reason she was dictating to her daughter-in-law, B. who, being from the young generation, knew the Turkish alphabet from chatting on the phone and from the Internet.

In yet another step we reversed everything back to Bulgarian so that I can check that the meaning hasn’t run away someplace else. And so it went along for an hour.

We wrote as much as we could and in the way we could. As Yanka put it with a laughter, “From five words we say, we write down one!”

However, I think that the result is not bad at all. Besides, in this process the three of us learned much more than a thousand words!

Here is it, with the back translation:

Hoşgeldiniz! Seviniyos ani geldiniz bizim açılişımiza „Еlde işlenmelere”.
Welcome! We are happy that you came to our opening “Hand-made”.

Bünları biz örüyos Minka Fatmiş. Hana ve Kolyo bize yardım ediyo açılışa.
We, Yanka and Maria, knitted these. Hannah and Kolio helped us with the opening.

Biz uraşıyoz gösterelim böyle güzellikleri okumamış insanlarında yapabildiyini. Akıl ve istek gerek.
We endeavoured to make these beautiful things in order to show that even we, people who have not studied, can achieve anything. It just requires wits and will.

Biz teşşekür ediyos Hanayla Kolyoya bu kariyeri yürüttükler için. Bizi için önemli çünkü bu iş zakonno.
We are very grateful to Hannah and Kolio, that they helped us make a step forward in our profession. (Yanka kept putting this sentence in as I tried to drop it!) For us most important is that it is something legal to do.

Buyrun gelin. Başlayo salıdan ot 6 ças.
Welcome in Tuesday from 6 o’clock.

Biz üraşıyos bügözel renklerle sizdısizin yaptıklarnızla yapabilirsinis danada gözel şeyler.
We put a lot of effort to make these beautiful things even prettier, we hope that you would also do better that which you can do.

Vol. 3 of Duvarmuzei will consist of video pieces of reporting from the neighbourhood, which we are making collaboratively with Filibeliler and other local volunteers.

The video clips will showcase neighbourhood discussions that are important for residents. Duvar Kolektiv would be supporting with the technical production: esp. editing, the final directing and then the communication.

The first video is here – by Ismail Sherif.

He shot it with his phone over one day. It took also a week of research. Personally, I was surprised and impressed by Ismail’s sense of dramatization, energy and rhythm! I hope you will like it too. Accompanying the video, Ismail wrote also a text article for the neighbourhood media.

Заснет е с телефона, в продължение на един ден, но и след проучване продължило почти седмица. Мен лично Исмаил ме изненада със страхотен драматизационен усет, раздвиженост и чувство за ритъм!

Надявам се, че ще ви хареса! Към видеото Исмаил написа и цяла статия.

[Update: At the end, the idea for a number of video reporting pieces didn’t get realised, but this clip still is part of Vol. 3, whose topic we restricted to the discussion about the rubbish.]