TRAVEL TO BULGARIA.

22.05-21.06.2014
GEFANGNIS I LE CARCERI
Caldaro (Italy)

Kiril returns home, while Elisabeth is going there for the first time.
They travel together.
Kiril has seen everything.
Elisabeth has not seen anything yet.
They travel together.
Kiril goes back to his spots, he knows them by heart, whether something has changed matters only to a certian degree.
Elisabeth encounters a world very different from the one she lives in. It is not the first time that she decides to confront what remains of places built by those who thought they could change the world.
Kiril returns home. He was born here and he lived here. At some point he left.
Every departure is a returning. Space and time cannot be divided.
Elisabeth wants to see everything.
Kiril has already seen everything.
Elisabeth photographs the deafening silence of the fall of a power. The outsized monuments, the buildings where the regime put itself on display,signs and symbols. From a distance, up close, inside, when one can enter.
Kiril knows where to go, how to move, when to enter .
Elisabeth portrays the ruins of a world that no longer exists but that no one has the courage to eliminate. She photographs ghosts.
Kiril knows where they live.
Elisabeth and the loneliness, the silence, again.
Kiril guides her.
Elisabeth catches the gaze of the person to whom she has entrusted her survival in the repetition of a daily gesture. How much does the collapse of power matter to those who never had it?
Kiril drives the car.
Elisabeth meets those who, with ease, spend their time on top of the ruins of history, because they were not yet born in that time.
Kiril knows these nuances.
Elisabeth returns to the world of the living, she registers the signs that mark the acceleration.
Kiril shops at the market he knows, he smiles as if he never left.
Elisabeth accompanies him. Kiril at his mother’s house.
Elisabeth carefully fine-tunes the details, the frames narrow.
Kiril in Izvor, in his father’s village, a journey through his time. This is where storks pass when they migrate; it is only here and a few other places that a man and a stork have become friends. So they say. Elizabeth listens.
Kiril sees everything, as if immersed in fog. Still – the stork, his friend, his nest. Collective memory goes further in time than individual memories.
Elisabeth looks around.
Kiril sees mysterious presences, human-animals and animal-humans, he conveys them in drawings.
The effects of the past live in us. Causes are lost in time.
Going to live elsewhere, the perception of being part of history becomes an inner necessity that helps sustain the thread, shadows come to life.
Elisabeth accompanies him on this journey.
Kiril photographs a pile of stork feathers. The black-and-white chronicle documents the scene of a crime following a betrayal. Friendship between beings of different species is dangerous. So they say.

Text by Emanuela de Cecco