What connects me with Bulgaria? Why I`m here? At least the far roots of my family could be called, but being sincere I don`t know a lot about it. There was a day of the sudden stop on the way through the Balkans when early morning I went out to get to the backstreets of Sofia. We climbed up the hill and got to a hidden but still public piazza semi-covered with lonely vendors and their goods spending their time, baking in the August sun. This place felt very special in its nature. Nearly pagan arena for time-rhythmic gathering with a performance of the ritual of the market. Being there I was thinking about it as a form of collective performance, locals seemed to be not so focused on a deal in fact, but looked as if they were repeating their ceremonial. After a while, leaving the place we felt on an edge to be boiled despite our southerness. Trying to escape from there and catch a car I saw 2 people several meters by the road. The intuitive cognizance flashed at one moment, and in an hour we were sitting together at their place in midtown, feeling as if we knew each other for a really long time. The random rendezvous, the haphazard anecdote case brought to the feeling that if I take the night bus in Odesa, pass by Tatarbunary and Sasyk lake, and after a morning swim in Varna cross the mountains, I`ll always get into the closest soul-mate place in the southeastern direction from my hometown. The Bitaka rendezvous gave a certain new feeling of the closest geography, through a gift of catch-up with local enthusiasts and art scene. This closeness of pure human and waste production, this joy of a fresh understanding that everything can come everywhere and anytime, ask for a tribute and reunite us again at the same point of the road on sunny Sunday morning to reenact it, and then on the top of the hill, we will meet three artistic gestures dedicated to the place and the case narrating on alternative interaction between the space and time, materiality and dis/usability, forgotten objects and episodes that reborn through new sensibility. 

Natalia Sielewicz: Feminist cruelties. Agency and politics of the pain in the work of Alyona Tokovenko and Antigonna