TIME STICKS TO THE WALLS

Essayistic film, photographs, objects

Between 1945 and 1989, the Republic of Bulgaria built new spaces for work and leisure with the determination for a future that never materialized.

Aquapark Bachinovo is one of those spaces. With the fall of communism in 1989, it became part of the transformation of property relations in post-socialist Bulgaria. In 2005, the municipality signed a 30-year concession agreement with a private company. This agreement fueled dreams of prosperity and capital flows. In reality, however, the concession operated under a different logic—one where profit was derived from losses and decay.

In 2017, the park was closed. Over 12 years, the obligations for repairs, investments, and free access had served as a means for accumulating fines that grew exponentially each year.

Five years later, after the failed concession, the park still looks as if it was abandoned just yesterday in a panicked escape from an unknown cataclysm, leaving everything behind, scattered all around.

In the architectural environment of our shared life, our fleeting present inscribes itself like shorthand notes onto the materiality of concrete, steel, bricks, and glass. Buildings are the concrete flesh of the shared narrative of coexistence, upon which we trace the marks left by the passage of time, through which we decipher the signs that time exists and recedes into the past. Now, as this structured temporality of functionality has been suspended, time sticks to the walls like mud—heavy and inert. The concrete floor rearranges itself with every step, inscribing all possible times, every memory from every place and moment, all recollections of pleasure and oblivion.

Realised with the financial support of the National Culture Fund of Bulgaria.

Tsvetelina Hristova is a lecturer at the University of Southampton and an affiliated researcher at Western Sydney University. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Western Sydney University (2021), an MA in Cultural Anthropology from Sofia University (2013), and an MA in Medieval Studies from Central European University (2006).

Tsvetelina works on topics that analyze the political effects of digital technologies through the lens of Marxist studies, social studies of science and technology, and political science. She has published in international journals such as Big Data and Society, International Journal of Communication, AI & Society, the Theory on Demand series of the Institute of Network Cultures, as well as in academic and political journals in Eastern Europe. Currently, she is conducting research on the intersection of temporality and visuality in the standards of temporality in digital networks.

Krassimir Terziev is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans various media, including video/film, photography, painting/drawing, and text. His practice questions the boundaries between reality and fiction while exploring the diverse transitions and tensions between a globalized world, dominated by an overwhelming variety of symbolic images, and its material foundations in technological, physical, and human "hardware."

Terziev holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Sofia University (2012) and an MA in Painting from the National Academy of Arts, Sofia (1997). In 2011, he received the *Unlimited* Award for Contemporary Bulgarian Art, and in 2007, the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art. His works are part of collections at *Centre Pompidou/MNAM, Paris; Arteast 2000+ Collection, Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; Art Collection Telekom, Bonn; Sofia City Art Gallery, Sofia; Kunstsammlung Hypovereinsbank, Munich*, and others.

Terziev has participated in residencies at Donumenta, Regensburg; KulturKontakt, Vienna; Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; Visual Seminar, Sofia; and Artslink, New York.