[synopsis]
As I breathe, as I sleep, as I eat, as I swim, as I shiver - I am haunted. I am haunted by places and times. I am haunted by other mes that have refused to stay quietly in the domain of the past and are clinging to memories of corridors, laughter, fear, the deep sadness of a present that slowly sinks into the cold dark swamp of a futureless past.
Transitions leave landscapes of abandon. Decommissioned factories, plots of land that have changed ownership several times - from private to public, to private to public, erasing and disorienting the identities of built environments, creating fragmented and traumatic urban landscapes that leave the materiality of spatial infrastructure raw and punctured with the wounds of political and economic abuse.
Buildings embody a narrative of inhabitation, a temporality of use that marks a sequence of events, a line of progression, an awareness of the passing of time. Opening hours, scheduled maintenance, last entry, аll recording, with each sign of wearing down, each chip, each scratch, an archive of utility and a memory of function.
Now that this structured temporality of function is suspended, time sticks to the walls like mud, thick and inert. A concrete floor that flickers through each step, browsing through all possible times, all memories of a place and time, all the memories of joy and abandon. A door that is every door, screeching in all their little haunted voices, a tile cracked like all tiles, a smell of everything and nothing.
In the aftermath of a failed concession, a water park in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, abandoned years ago, still looks like it was evacuated yesterday in a panic escape from unknown cataclysm, leaving everything behind scattered around.
[credits]
project by Krassimir Terziev & Tsvetelina Hristova
script: Tsvetelina Hristova
photography & editing: Krassimir Terziev
voice: Charlotte Smith
[directors intent]
The approach in this essay film is twofold.
Traditionally, in filmmaking, the image moves with the motion of the camera. Here, we try to achieve movement inside the still image in two ways, challenging the stability of the opposition between still images (photography) and moving images (film). We do that, first, by perpetually modifying the properties of the digital image: its hue and saturation and, second, by overemphasising the moment of transition between images through double exposure, creating a disorienting and un-still mutations in the image, where each frame is always in transition between two distinct images. This visual technique correlates with the voice-over narrative, which dwells on the instability of transitions and the mutations of reality, time and space in their aftermath.
The voice over is in a similar seamless flux between recording subjective experience and providing sparse insights of the spatial urban setting that is the subject and object of the film. A place that emanates the melancholia of a never ending transitional period between ideologically driven etatism and destructive neoliberal grabs.
[biographies]
