HERBARIUM

Herbarium in the explanatory dictionary (Rechnik.info) is a collection of herbarium plantsintended for study. My personal herbarium is a collection of ideas and projects – some of which realized, most still not – to which I periodically look (with mixed feelings), mostly to see if they still function, how much of the initial creative energy remains in them. This is why I chose my “herborized object” in this exhibition to be the SPAESAMENTI project, on which I worked in 2001–2002, and in the box sent to me from Bulgaria, to “embed” all the available documentation on its creation and realization over the past 20 years.

2000–2001 were the first years of my permanent establishment in Italy. I must note that my motives were neither economic nor political, I was not an immigrant in this sense. Yet, despite all the favorable circumstances for me, during this new period of my life, I couldn’t shake off the oppressive feelingthat I was a foreigner, an outsider, that I was different from the Italians. The initial euphoria from encountering a different society and culture, distinct from the one I had lived in until then, was gradually displaced by a sense of overwhelming anxiety. I fervently did not want to give up any part of my Bulgarian identity, while at the same time, I was striving to quickly acquire and construct my new Italian identity, and, of course, to gain the long-desired recognition and satisfaction. In my head, two voices echoed – one spoke to me in Bulgarian, the other in Italian, each trying to dominate the other, and the result was a confusing sense of division, which made me retreat into a stifling silence.

SPAESAMENTI, as an installation, represents the bedroom in my home, constructed to real size and covered everywhere with a multiplied image of an eye (mine), which I had previously sculpted from paraffin. I tried to create an optical disorientation in an everyday, banal, familiar interior, in which one could hardly stay for more than 10/15 minutes. Spaesato in the Italianlanguage has several meanings, according to the Treccani encyclopedia. A spaesato is someone who feels disoriented, uncomfortable, lost without any points of reference, because they are outside of their usual, familiar environment. Other synonyms are the adjectives “confused”, “lost”, “uncharacteristic”. Back then, I couldn’t realize that this feeling of alienation was a painful (for me personally) initial transitional phase of a long-lasting process, which the great sociologist and philosopher of Bulgarian origin, Tzvetan Todorov, calls TRANSCULTURAZIONE.

I could not find any information about whether Tzvetan Todorov was able to “translate” this book into Bulgarian during his lifetime, and I would like to apologize for my boldness in translating this short excerpt from the Italian edition, which in turn is a translation from the French… In 2004, I came across this book, titled in Italian “L’uomo spaesato” with the subtitle “I percorsi dell’appartenenza”, and since then, it has always accompanied me in my attempts to clarify certain intuitions and processes in the formation of personal or collective identity, a theme that still reflects in my works even today, 20 years later. Because to feel at peace within a culture, years of “apprenticeship” are needed.