For three months in late 2022, I was hosted by the Buinho Creative Hub in the village of Messejana, in the south of Portugal. My first artist residency and my first experience living in the countryside coincided to bring about a productive period of quiet self-reflection and patient search for visual stimulation in my unfamiliar surroundings. I have always thought of creativity as universal, innate to all of us no matter our age, locality, or way of life, and all of its traces and the serendipitous discoveries of objects and materials that this tiny village had to offer in abundance only further confirmed this for me. Regardless of its materializations, the creative process is accessible to anyone; it is within us to be able to see the world anew each waking morning, even at times and in places where life seems to be standing still. We could choose to look at something from a different angle, close in on a detail, or let our gaze travel far into the landscape... We could even pretend that what we wish for is true to our eyes, wouldn't that be enough?

Do bright colors change in the light of a grey, rainy day?
Does a line of green emerge where blue and yellow meet?
What shade of blue is Alentejo blue?
Is that fog climbing up the hills? Are the clouds laying low over the fields? Or is it the sea approaching from the distance?
It's enough to imagine—to imagine is to experience.

The works from the series Permanent/impermanent, Fixed in place, Alentejo blues, Object additions, Fake flowers, and the ongoing project Enough to imagine were all conceived during this residency.

Some of these images were created instinctually during the pandemic period. Later, I began to weave them together with images from my personal archive in an attempt to reflect on the traces of time passing and standing still, days marked by repetitive patterns, generative solitude, and introspection, learning to live in isolation and with the uncertainty of what is to come.

This experimental publication explores the potential of found images, mementos, and ephemera to serve as the basis for visual research and narrative building. The project started from a set of old postcards, photographs, and handwritten notes purchased from a thrift store in Tallinn between December 2018 and March 2019, when I realized most of them were related to the story of a single family. The various traces of evidence, interrelated meanings, objects, names, places, and their histories suggested many possible directions to explore further through photography and rephotography. This handmade book is an archive, a fragmented narrative that emerged while processing the findings and discovering a few random facts along the way. While these supported the research, in its totality the work is not a factual examination of the past, but quite freely based on assumptions, stereotypes, and projections; it remains open to multiple interpretations.

What struck me was how these collections of objects—personal belongings, kitchen utensils, appliances and, above all, the postcards themselves, once without a doubt important to their owners, were now being discarded. However, it was also possible to acquire them again, transform and reinterpret them, as to give them new meaning and purpose. One could call it an anti-documentary approach, as I was experimenting with how much of my subject’s story could be reconstructed without access, without permission, without being intrusive, without getting closer, without contact. I was sustained by how much I could find out, how close I could get, the places and the distances the story could go and in the unreliable, self-revealing and unexpected ways it did so. What was allowed and acceptable to appropriate? What were the unspoken rules of engagement? When was it time to stop? A publication that documents the life of a stranger from as distant a position as possible, it was rather a method of research that helped me process and integrate emotions, experiences and memories of my own.

In 2019, in the frames of a three-month long documentary photography course lead by Kalev Vapper at the Open Academy of the Estonian Academy of Arts, I turned my lens towards various objects in order to discover the stories they contain or possibly tell of their known or unknown owners: objects one gets attached to; objects being gifted, collected, lost and found, lent and borrowed, forgotten and abandoned, put up for sale, thrown away… I was interested in the ways how and in the reasons why everyday objects become imbued with meaning and in the conditions under which their value changes. Simultaneously, I questioned to what extent photography has the power to inject value into objects or reconstruct it. Regardless of their objective worth, over time some things turn out useless and others become irreplaceable. Is it always painful to lose precious keepsakes or could it be liberating as well? When is it time to let go of things that have become an extension of our self and make up our past, actual or dreamt up identities? What happens to our arduously accumulated and carefully curated possessions in the course of our lives, and thereafter, when a stranger stumbles upon them?

Archeology of sorts, this process of categorizing, typologizing and documenting objects doesn’t necessarily speak of facts, rather it feeds the imagining of possible truths and hidden stories. With it comes the (albeit illusionary) comfort of knowing that our surroundings are understandable, controllable and graspable; that there must be something about us, within us, which remains the same even if everything else is constantly changing. It is also an exercise of keeping the pieces of one’s identity together and protecting oneself from forgetting.

Partially, the inspiration for this project came from reading Sergei Dovlatov’s novel The Suitcase, originally published in Russian in 1986. It contains eight autobiographical stories based on items the author brought in his suitcase on his exile to the USA in 1978. I started out by documenting a set of personal belongings I have irrationally and systematically carried with me when moving from one country to another in the last decade, things asked from and given to me by my parents that I could not bear losing. Each image testifies that at some moment in time this object existed and it was mine; it was important to me; it spoke of my relationship with my place of origin and my past, but also of my desires for the future; at some moment in time, this object was me. Even if I moved on to approach the same questions from other perspectives—through objects found in public space or other people’s possessions, these images inevitably reveal more about myself than anyone else.

The images in the series Treasure trove, Self-identity kit, Like father, like son, as well as the experimental handmade book For Mati (more below), all form part of this work.

In 2019, in the frames of a three-month-long course on photography and creativity led by Kalev Vapper at the Open Academy of the Estonian Academy of Arts, I explored photography as a tool for introspection. I took photographs looking at the sea at rest or raging, the sunlight moving on the wall of my bedroom, the wind blowing silently in the crowns of bare trees; I took photographs looking up or sideways… This act of avoidance, of turning away from what begs for attention and instead in a direction where not much is going on, nothing particularly interesting is at play, creates a space for reflection, a time to be quiet and serene.

Once photographed, the repeating, consecutive or nearly identical images invite us to attend to minute details that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. Looking at an image that is one and the same and yet not, one’s eyes begin to make comparisons from point to point, tracing the lines, untangling, flipping through the archive of what has already been seen, fixating and regressing in rapid saccades. Much similarly, the needle and thread pierce through the surface of the printed photograph. Stitching restores that which is no longer, next to what most certainly has been, layering the past onto the present onto the past. Meditative as it becomes by way of prolonging the time spent with a single image, the process reflects a desire to trace back and connect with the past, preserve and anchor it in time and space. It’s an act of holding on as opposed to letting go, a weakness, a rigidness, a resistance—against forgetting but also against change, out of fear and the need to control. Stitching, even more so than taking a photograph, is a futile attempt to hold on to a passing moment. However, both serve to slow down time and thereby allow for the acceptance of life as an ongoing, ever-changing series of fleeting moments that cannot be repeated.

The images in the series Tree stitchings, Light and shadow, Breathe in, breathe out, and Looking where nobody else is looking were all made during this period.

This ongoing series emerged as part of the research for my graduation project on urban wildness and marginal nature in cities. The images have been taken in various places I lived for longer periods (my hometown of Lovech, Bulgaria; Vienna, Austria; Tallinn, Estonia) and occasionally during my travels. They touch upon issues of urban shrinkage and depopulation, sprawl and suburbanization, growth and degrowth, rewilding cities, rewilding childhood, sustainability and local biodiversity. These are places of the sublime within the hustle and bustle of the city, chance encounters with untamed nature, experimental playgrounds that invite loose parts play and unplanned exploration.