Borderland: Czechia-Poland

How does a border resonate? Zorka Wollny invited composer and musician Martin Dytko to a sound match exploring borderscapes in Czechia-Poland. In a co-creative process with residents from Český Těšín/Cieszyn and Ostrava they delve into narratives surrounding the meanings and materializations of bordering practices, as part and parcel of everyday life. The voice and sound-based research conceives the borderland as a place of encounter, interaction, and clash. Therefore, the border is seen not just as a point where various histories converge, but also as a space that shapes both individual and collective processes of identity formation and belonging, continuously transforming, contesting, and subverting the socio-political order. As the idea of Europe and the European Project undergo transformation, it becomes vital that diverse voices shape their emerging meaning. What futures can be imagined from here?

The performative concerts will take place on October 2–3, 2024, at the former synagogue in Český Těšín as part of the city’s 33rd International Theatre Festival Without Borders, and at the Krytyka Polityczna Center in Cieszyn. These performances will be featured in a video work by the artist that introduces the participants, provides insights into the production process, and further elaborates on questions surrounding bordering practices between Czechia and Poland.

Participants:

CZK Team: Kateřina Rézi Szopová, Zuzana Sekerová, Joa Ferfecki, Pepe Valíků , lead by Martin Dytko

PL Team: Weronika Masarska, Paulina Łyczek, Dawid Bury, Anita Kramarczyk & Fiona Swoboda, lead by Zorka Wollny

With the support of Natalia Kałuża, Anna Pluta and Joanna Wowrzeczka
of Krytyka Polityczna Center in Cieszyn, as well as Petra Slováček Rypienová and Stefan Mańka, directors of the 33. International Theatre Festival Without Borders.

Borderland: Bulgaria-Greece-Turkey

The project The Travelling Monument by Georgi Bogdanov and Boris Missirkov focuses on a monument that does not exist yet.

Bulgaria has over a dozen memorials dedicated to border guards, mostly near the border with Greece and Turkey. But there is not a single monument in memory of those who lost their lives trying to escape the Eastern Bloc through these borders. A lot of people, mostly young, attempted to flee to the West between 1944 and 1990 – and many of them were simply shot down by border patrols. The exact number of victims is unknown. The rough estimate is that over 500 Bulgarian citizens and many others from other Socialist countries lost their lives there. This topic has been largely ignored over the past thirty years, apart from a number of short documentaries and a few articles, the faces and the names of these victims remain anonymous. The Travelling Monument is dedicated to the people who lost their lives attempting to escape the Eastern Bloc through the Bulgarian borders.

The artists explore the possibility of devising an imaginary and travelling anti-monument, which will be dislocated along the border, becoming a provocative intervention in a variety of landscapes.

Borderland: Bulgaria-Greece-Turkey

The Border Walks project by Ivan Moudov explores the border region of Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey, beginning with the foraging of wild mushrooms as the central activity, process, or outcome, drawing on various artistic and literary traditions.

Fungi and their vegetative apparatus enter into symbiosis with other organisms and create an underground network of invisible, interdependent and inextricable relationships. Delving into the mushroom deposits and the art of foraging, through hikes and interactions with local communities, the project searches for parallels between the natural environments and landscapes along the three borders, based on first-hand experience. Studying the structure of fungal ecosystems and the narratives of forests allows us to understand the potential for shared existence, amid human interventions that often lead to the destruction of nature.

The artist collaborates with writers during walks along the three-sided borders, offering a way to imagine future landscapes free of mental and physical boundaries, weaving together verbal and visual narratives.

Borderland: Bulgaria-Greece-Turkey

When observing Eastern and South-Eastern Europe from a distance, we may note that it has been historically – and in some cases still is – characterised by the diversity of languages and ethnic backgrounds among its population. However, this diversity, which might be viewed as a source of cultural wealth, contrasts with the border demarcations in place since the nineteenth century, whose implicit aim was to create defined spaces for homogeneous communities.

In her work, Esra Ersen addresses the people affected by the processes of bordering between Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, which remain a poignant reminder of past injustices for minorities. She exemplarily focuses on the population that, over the course of these bordering processes, was most significantly impacted by state-sponsored homogenisation and, as a result, forced migration. Using this border triangle as an example, she researches how individual, public, and spatial narratives influence the practices of memory, and which truths (or legends) are told on either side of the border.

For on the one hand, there are the real borders, geographically, politically, and publicly anchored, and then there are the imaginary borders – those that are not tied to a piece of land but that rather persist in transgenerational communities through mentality and memories.

The ZimmerFrei group is creating a short film for B-Shapes, made up of soundscapes, voices and sudden visions recorded on 16 mm film on the Bulgarian-Turkish border.

These narratives and film footage focus on the almost completely uninhabited landscape and dense forests, the Black Sea and the Resovo River, which marks the southeasternmost point of Europe. The project also highlights the experiences of the people – the borderlanders – who share their stories of living and working at the border. Borderlands are spaces that oscillate between being a bridge and a barrier, and the people inhabiting these strips of land navigate these raised and lowered, restored and transgressed, surveyed and liberated boundaries.

ZimmerFrei explores places and stories from multiple perspectives, examining how perceptions of borders shift when observed from different vantage points and modes of movement. Their evolving film reels aim to condense experiences, aspirations and dreams, leaving lasting traces of encounters that give rise to silent glimpses, new questions and unresolved listening.

ZimmerFrei’s B-Shapes ‘Borderwalks’ are staged with Ivano Lollo (cameraman), Nikol Delcheva (interpreter) and the help of Shado and Fondazione Home Movies, two Italian non-profit organisations devoted to analogue photography and private archives on film. Thanks for their help during the field research go to Cveta Petkova, Nikol Delcheva.