Gabi Dinkova's "What Once Was" pieces together the fragments of her Bulgarian-American identity through themes of loss, displacement, and belonging. Infrequent visits to Bulgaria left her with fragmented memories and a sense of belonging always in flux. Like many first-generation Americans, her identity was forged by a combination of loss and luck—a yearning for a cultural bond just out of reach. 

Growing up between two cultures—her Bulgarian background and her life in America—she constantly navigated a space of living in a rapidly-developing, first world country, while returning to a homeland where time stood still. With each subsequent visit to Bulgaria, she inevitably comes across news of a relative’s passing and is once again reminded of her distance, both physically and emotionally, from her heritage. Yet while these relatives are gone, their belongings—traces from their lives in communist and post-communist Bulgaria—remain. Due to Bulgaria’s post-communist socioeconomic conditions, the low housing demand in Bulgaria has left many apartments unoccupied, causing her great grandmother’s apartment to exist as an inadvertent time capsule—untouched and preserved as it was during her lifetime. This space offers a glimpse into her life, providing a strikingly unchanged, tangible connection to Dinkova's own unknown history through objects of the past that are silent markers of identity.

She explores the past through archival photographs and objects left behind in her late relatives’ abandoned home, and the present through domestic portraits of her remaining family in their homes. These photographs reconstruct a narrative of family, culture, and lineage from her first-generation perspective.