MEMORIES+Bulgaria

How to reach and touch the live memory of the elderly generations in order to find in it traces of holiday culture as an integral part of the entire cultural memory of people – individuals and communities, who live in a certain area? Within the frame of the project “**THE MEMORIES OF THE ELDERLY HELP US BUILD OUR PRESENT”**, we initiated an investigation into that memory to uncover in it the signs, which link the past to the present. We train people from different generations to share information which can be useful for others as well. We were impressed to discover that even in the smallest inhabited villages of a particular region of today’s Europe, places that can easily be identified as “non-places”, reside generations who are vivid carriers of live memory. A “non-place” can be defined as a point of transit between big cities, suburbia, villages, between rural and post-industrial areas in western and southern Europe and in the post-war period for the Balkan countries. //The Elderly Project// proposes not only meetings between young and old generations, but also sharing of living models and practices. In this first stage of the project, we accentuate on the memory related to winter celebrations and together with that try to create a collage-like fictive cartography connecting holidays, landscapes and the people who inhabit them. Drawing on our experience, we have incorporated the art, performance, publication and interview techniques in the realization of the project. We sought to penetrate into the holiday microcosm of local communities through the instruments we have a thorough command of. With the help of the elderly – representatives of quite different ethnic and cultural groups, we recreated a more complete picture of the live generational practices, a picture identifying different key themes in Bulgaria which could constitute a drifting archipelago of modernity in this part of Europe. It is vital to highlight the poetic and absurd element inherent to this project – to “bring back” the past by pulling it out of modest objects, pictures, garments, postcards, newspapers cut-outs, texts, joyful stereotypes, rhythms and melodies preserved in people’s homes and hearts from times past. It is important to ask ourselves: is this intervention enough to help us understand why we are exactly what we are today and how could we become better by collecting a huge collage built on multiple places and models? This experience is an attempt at restitution as much as at appropriation of fragmented local parts of the memory of humanity as a whole.