Follow Me
Black Spider Web, 2019. Cotton rope. Gabrovtsi village, Bulgaria. 540cm(L) X 350cm(W) X 260cm(H).
During the artistic residency, we were hosted in an abandoned boarding school in the town of Gabrovtsi. The construction is very spacious and it is not possible to inhabit it mostly only by the organizers. They have adapted the first floor with a kitchen and workshops and the rest is mostly abandoned. Due to its place in a wild area on the edge of town. Its limits are adjacent to those of the mountain and the forest. Every year nature reclaims the exterior and interior of the house and appropriates the spaces it has. Before and during the festival, the production team cleans the house and adapts it so that the artists can live in it. The second floor has the bathrooms and enough bedrooms and beds for everyone, we also adopted a large room for conferences and video projections. Since all this space is enough for the production of the festival. The third floor of the residence lacks electricity as no human has occupied that floor for years. however, they visit it often to repair the roof and fix any leaks that may arise after the winter thaw. The third floor becomes a space taken by the swallows that inhabit the house almost all year round. They have their nests there on the walls, on the ceilings, and in the lamps, which have been kept for generations, perhaps hundreds and hundreds of years. The swallows are not afraid of us, they seem to be accustomed to humanity towards our presence. It is spring and the swallows have young hungry waiting in the nests, every corner of the third floor is inhabited.
Upon discovering these rooms, I chose one of them for my installation. I wove the corner quarter corner leaving a hole in the center through which the swallows would pass hundreds of times each day just as they do when entering and leaving the windows of the house when looking for food for their young. I wanted to find out if it was possible to change the flow of movement of birds by modifying the space when weaving it. At first, the swallows only passed through the center of the facility but over time they got used to it and calculated the size of the tissue and even sat on the pole and flew through with surgical precision.
At night and before going to sleep the volunteers search the whole house with flashlights. One night they looked for me at dinner time and took me to the swallow's room with my installation to show me a curious optical effect that occurred when they walked around the room accompanied by the lanterns. The lights transformed the space by deforming its volume. The shadows changed and merged with the black fabric creating a sensory spectacle. we play with this effect in a performative way to create a video recording of the piece in the dark.
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