Traces

2013-2014, digital photography, body movement, exposure: 5-30 sec, neutral density filter x10, camera zoom and tilt

Traces is inspired by a coincidence in my and my father's professional biography. When he was 28, Georgi Karadjov visited Cote d'Azure as a chief engineer of SS Ocean Monarch - Varna. In 1968 SS Ocean Monarch docked at the port of Villefranche sur Mer, close to Nice, for a major overhaul which took several months. My father, who has never been a member of the Communist Party, had the rare chance to travel in the free world. To this day he loves to tell stories about these four years of his life.

At the same age, when I was 28 I was selected to represent Bulgaria in the photography section of the 7th Jeux de la Francophonie, which was hosted in Nice, France in 2013. My project was entitled Еx-mured and showed a process, which was supposed to be the opposite to immurement. In the span of ten days I visited most of the big ports in Cote d'Azure, from Saint Tropez to Menton. In the open areas I found niches, arches and doorways which I interpreted as passageways. Making sequences, using long exposure and camera movement, I tried to stage the acts of immurement and “exmurement”. By consequent changes in composition I make an attempt to present my own structured experience of the collective family unconscious, which we metaphorically describe as inherited by bloodline.