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.
