My late great grandmother's apartment. Kavarna, Bulgaria, 2019.
With each subsequent visit to Bulgaria, I inevitably come across news of a relative’s passing and am once again reminded of my distance, both physically and emotionally, from my heritage. Yet while these relatives are gone, their belongings—traces from their lives in communist and post-communist Bulgaria—remain. Due to the low housing demand in Bulgaria, their apartments are left untouched and unoccupied, preserved as they were during their lifetimes. These spaces serve as time capsules, offering glimpses into their lives and providing a strikingly unchanged, tangible connection to my own unknown history.
I utilize the deserted homes to demonstrate both the emotional resonance for me personally, and also a sense of what it was like to live in the world my parents left behind: a place pervaded by struggle and limited opportunity during communism, and, after communism fell, the stagnation that followed a mass emigration out of the country as people searched for ambitions of another life abroad.
When I return to Bulgaria it is as if time has stopped, everything exactly as it was, providing me with a breathing archive of the cultural and historical landscape of Bulgaria. I photograph deserted homes and communities to understand how the political and economic environment has impacted the lives of my relatives and their living spaces, the personal spaces where the traces of my family once were. These spaces, although abandoned, are kept up by members of the family, and my work is as much an exploration of their lives as a testament to their preservation efforts.