Machines, Texts, Voices | Juan Pablo Macías & Kamen Stoyanov

Living Together is an artistic research and production program curated by Katia Anguelova and Lucrezia Cippitelli in the context of the exhibition series Superpositions, initiated by ICA-Sofia.

The program aims at proposing a complex network of audiovisual projects and installations, which will gather in Sofia an international community of artists who reflect through their practices on the idea of living together, coexisting, co-creating, inhabiting as a collectivity, recalling common hidden memories, inventing outer spaces and outer lives in common.

 

The program follows the strategies proposed by Superpositions series, a set of events which follow each other, organized in three chapters on two main displays: public screenings of the work of three artists followed by a site-specific exhibition within the spaces of ICA-Sofia.

 

The second part of Making at the gallery of the Institute of Contemporary Art – Sofia, is the exhibition titled Machines, Texts, Voices, which brings together works by Juan Pablo Macías and Kamen Stoyanov. Both artists deal with the anarchist philosophy and its legacy nowadays.

 

The exhibition includes a new work by Macías: a new issue of his editorial project TIEMPO MUERTO, a free-press journal printed in 1000 copies. TIEMPO MUERTO #7 will be published by the end of the exhibition Living Together and it is co-produced by the Institute of Contemporary Art – Sofia and Fondazione Shapdiz.
This new on-going production is based on a poem the artist wrote in 2018 after a brief research which links Thracian deity of Sabazios with the Bulgarian/Macedonian anarchism of the XXth century. The poem, as the result of linking the anarchist movement in the Balkans with the Phrygian-Thracian deity of Sabazios (Greeks represented this deity as Zeus and Dionysius), is a way of “invoking the notion of abundance as a condition of nature, as the promise of nature, and signaling how the rituals and struggles that have been historically built around this notion, have set themselves aside from the canonical framework of religious, philosophical and political hegemonies. An invocation of the complete ‘other’, the complete ‘no-thing’ that conforms reality” affirms Macias in the editorial note of the journal.

 

Kamen Stоyanov’s installation deals with his research dedicated to Bulgarian anarchist Georgi Konstantinov, who blew up the Stalin monument in Sofia’s Borisov Park in 1953, and was subsequently imprisoned for ten years. From the 1970s to the present, Konstantinov developed the concept of the “robotronic revolution” (from robots and electronics) that entails a “radical change in the economy due to the mass spread of new technologies which replaced human labor with computers and robots, spreading rapidly in all spheres of human activity.” His theories were heavily influenced by Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), an American computer scientist, mathematician and philosopher.

This work has been presented for the first-time last year in Berlin during the Stoyanov’s solo show “Robotronic Revolution, a machine reading the book” (curated by Boris Kostadinov) in Scope BNL Berlin.

 

For this exhibition, Stoyanov will add to his installation the first edition of Anti Slav-Bulgarian History (an attempt for a nihilistic interpretation of Bulgarian history), a book written in 1986 by Georgi Konstantinov when he was living in Paris and presented for the first time in Bulgaria. Konstantinov’s book is an anti-narrative, a satirical work which addresses the question of how to construct a national history.

 

Kamen Stoyanov also makes a selection of the anarchist library (from the archives of the Federation of Bulgarian Anarchists), reminding that a (private) library is both a means to a goal and a research tool rather than an accessory. The collection of books chosen by Kamen Stoyanov will be available for consultation to the public in the exhibition space.

 

 

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Living Together is a program of artistic research and artistic production curated by Katia Anguelova and Lucrezia Chipitelli in the context of the SUPERPOSITIONS THREE exhibition series initiated by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Sofia (ICA-Sofia). The events are realized with the financial assistance of the National Fund "Culture" under the program "Creation" and Gaudenz B. Ruf

 

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Juan Pablo Macìas (b. 1974 Puebla, Mexico. Lives in Livorno, Italy)

In editorial projects, poetry, installations, performances, video, text, and photographs, Juan Pablo Macías investigates systems of representation and affectivity. His research-oriented work often considers the specific history of anarchism as a critique of representation, contrasting authoritative hegemonic knowledge to the often-hidden or repressed insurrectional knowledge passed between marginalized communities and activist networks. He is editor in chief of TIEMPO MUERTO journal (2012-ongoing) and WORD+MOIST PRESS (2014-ongoing), two editorial projects on anarchism and libertarian thought. Using the anarchist logic of expropriation, these publications draw from the unique resources available in contemporary art institutions and foundations to bring this information to light (using public resources to make information public), and often are accompanied with conceptually oriented works by the artist.

 

 

Kamen Stoyanov (b. 1977 in Ruse, Bulgaria. Lives in Vienna and Sofia)
Born and raised in Bulgaria. He studied visual arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and Film at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia.
His practice includes film, video, performance, installation, painting, and drawing. He recently shot and is in the process of finishing his first feature film “Zvezda”, funded by the Bulgarian National Film Center. His short experimental film “Up and Through” was awarded as the ‘Best Experimental’ at the Dumbo Film Festival 2020 and was nominated for Best Experimental at the Long Story Shorts 2020 International Film Festival in Bucharest. His works have been presented at exhibitions, festivals and biennials worldwide.