Off-site is a research collective that investigates what critical heritage practices are made possible—and how attitudes towards waste, ecology, and environment shift—when we re-imagine the role of care in collection, exhibition, and archive strategies. Off-site takes the Balkans as a case study to contour new modes of curatorial thought, artistic practice, and material urgency in the wake of the region’s geopolitical transition from an Eastern to a Western edge. Within this neoliberal turn amongst the ruins of Soviet, Ottoman, Byzantine empires, stories of material movements, histories of land and built environments, and knowledge of plant and animal life emerge in new ways. By exploring the dissonant heritage of the past, Off-site investigates the post-imperial ways of life that animate the present.
Ecologies of Prehod engages with sites of ruination in Bulgaria through sculpture, installation, sound, and moving-image work. For the past four years, invited artists have participated in long-term collaborations with specific sites through mailed prompts collected by locals in Bulgaria, distributed by the project team, and entrusted in the artists’ care for the duration of their research. Prompts include care agreements that accompany specimens of rubble and flora collected from landscapes and building stock left in ruin since the start of the transition period from a planned to a market economy known as Prehod. Ranging from an Ottoman-era hammam brick to plant specimens from an abandoned Soviet-era observatory, prompts are composed of mobile fragments that serve as aural, visual, and material witnesses to Prehod. Over the course of their circulation across the globe, mobile fragments gain new meaning in the form of artifacts that alter and move through different hands and geographies. Composed of this dispersed assemblage of vital matter that prompts the production of new work, Ecologies of Prehod introduces alternative ways of approaching the archive through the lens of environmental humanities and critical heritage and media studies.
At Swimming Pool, five artists adopt a “thinking with matter” approach to conceive of a critical framework for working with unofficial heritage and archives through the notion of Prehod: Nicolas Kisic Aguirre, Katarina Burin, Sam Ghantous, Elitza Koeva, and Manar Moursi. Through a range of haptic, visual, and sensory modes of re-inscription, each artist transforms their prompt material through acts of translation, transmission, reinvention, and adaptation. Ingested both figuratively and literally, the mobile fragment enters and exits the body of the artist to find new life as an object, surface, moving-image or sonic piece. Itinerant and variable, the mobile fragment undoes the fixed notion that the artifact as a curated object can only circulate within the space of institutional care. This plasticity further extends into the material logic of the ruin form from which the mobile fragment was extracted. Amongst other biological, chemical, and physical processes, the ruin is subject to both parasitic and new life that are often interchangeable: plants that feed off its nutrients, fungal growth that aids in the breakdown of matter, birds that find shelter in their migratory patterns. Sometimes, the ruin is analyzed and preserved; at other times, discarded. Between organism and waste, the mobile fragment partakes in a metabolic process from environment to body that brings about a more capacious understanding of experimental preservation practice and collective care.
In re-imagining what it means to care for tangible and intangible heritage from a distance, the exhibition rethinks Prehod from a proper noun to a process of transitioning from one material state, historical period, and geographic place to another. This process has come to shape a uniquely Balkan condition, but simultaneously speaks to post-imperial transitions beyond the region. Consequently, the exhibition offers a first foray in exploring Off-site’s larger objective: To follow geopolitical vectors from the Balkans outwards and rethink local and global relationships across borders through the architectural legacy of empire. Redefining the Balkan’s relationship to geography in this way also reshapes epistemic boundaries by engaging architecture as a network of relationships between collective memory, the history of landscape, and the effects of neoliberal policies on urban space and the natural environment today. Ecologies of Prehod thus offers an expanded understanding of environments in transition, both past and present. The liquid and soil terrains of the littoral edge, vegetal life, mineral matter, and animal migration entangle with the lived experience and oral history of the people who cohabitate with the land. Thinking with the vital matter of heritage ecosystems offers new approaches to building alternative forms of knowledge production in experimental preservation practice, environmental humanities, and critical media practice.
Off-site was co-founded by Borislav Angelov, Pauline Shongov, and Maya Shopova in 2020.
