MINIMAL BALKAN DIARY

2014

Minimal Balkan Diary
20.09 – 23.11.2014
CAPUCHIN NUNS CIVIC MUSEUM, BAGNACAVALLO
Ravenna (Italy)

In the gray sea of memory, stories emerge. Often incomprehensible, mysterious, sometimes seductive, certainly surreal, but nonetheless new stories, which take life from our experience without adhering to it. Images, when they navigate through memories, rarely remain close to reality; instead, they drift away, getting lost until they become something else, tormented by the breaking waves of time that decompose and recompose them.

Color is meant for things that are close, that touch each other. The Renaissance masters already knew this.

There is a discreet distance, of space and time, that separates the realization of this project by Kiril Cholakov from the land and the humanity he wants to tell us about, Bulgaria obviously, but not only, or perhaps no longer, now that the place where his memories reside, his home, is perceived as beyond the world. A distance that materializes in a delicate curtain of words that become anecdotes, of anecdotes that become stories… and finally fog. If you get closer, you can grasp its plot (A wonder! The plot, which is both a woven thread and the scaffolding of the narrative) composed of a dense and poorly concealed verbal flow. But is it really worth it? If you step back, everything condenses into a few shadows, everything coagulates into unexpected shapes and, perhaps, finds its place. A silent and essential world is born fromit, one that is truer than true, because if there is any meaning for Cholakov, it resides in the little that remains imprinted, in what remains.

It could only be like this. The images evoked in those canvases – which return after years of torpor – speak to us of a middle land (the Balkans, a place of conquest and frontier) where the advances and retreats of great empires and ideologies have sedimented the consciousness and landscapes of what remains. Traces of solitary existences stand suspended within muffled voids, as in a snowy world, where everything is still, and where the echo of every tiny daily gesture amplifies until it takes on the imperishable rumble of theepic. In a universe like this, every humble presence seems animated by a mysterious will that ceases to be a private affair and becomes a universal saga.

It is difficult to find artists like Cholakov who have this innate ability to narrate. His storytelling is made for images and, as we know, in a society overwhelmed by excessive information like ours, the only secret to creating emotions is telling stories. We are even more moved to see that in this great saga, the constant and discreet presence of the stork can coexist with many symbols that evoke the anticipation of the end, or the end itself. It especially emerges in the photographic series and the notebook pages: birth and death, the beginning and end of that great flight, which is the cycle of life, perpetually unfold against the backdrop of an indifferent, grayscale world. The stork… At first glance, it unsettles us. Then it interrogates us. Finally, we see it follow old “Bohemo” docilely, as if it were made of the same material. “Bohemo” and the stork. We smile at it, sweetly, as if it were a fairytale that subverts everyparameter of logic: two solitary beings who choose each other, in spite of their kind. It is thanks to them that even the visions of the countryside cemetery, or the poor funeral notices, never manage to take on the tones of tragedy.

If it weren’t for the wisdom of the eccentric, perhaps everything would be resolved into a heap of feathers in the middle of the fields.

Curated by Diego Galizzi