Concept / Directing / Camera: Adnan Softić
Camera drone: Boyan Ljubenov Video editing / Sound: Nina Softić
Commissioned by: ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen within the framework of the touring exhibition EVROVIZION.CROSSING STORIES AND SPACES.
Curated by: Sabina Klemm, Sanja Kojić-Mladenov
Nadejda means hope. It is also the name of a district in the Bulgarian city of Sliven, where around 10,000 Roma live. Surrounded by industry, railway tracks, waste grounds, and walls, the settlement has only two exits.
The work examines this spatial order not as something given, but as the result of decisions whose origins have gradually disappeared from view. A wall that stands long enough becomes part of everyday life. Holes are broken through it and sealed again. What began as an act of separation is maintained until it appears as a condition of the place itself.
Moving between the strict geometry of urban planning and children at play, between the view from above and life behind the walls, NADEJDA asks how segregation produces not only spaces but also images. The conditions created by exclusion are detached from the history of their making and eventually read as characteristics of those who live within them.
The work describes this continuous maintenance of an existing order as a maintenance of invisibility. Its consequences extend into institutions: a British man previously convicted of sexually abusing children was able to work with children in Nadejda for years as a missionary and youth worker. Legal proceedings have repeatedly been delayed and remain unresolved.
Invisibility here is not the absence of images. Nadejda can be seen. What disappears is the history of how what we see was produced.
NADEJDA is part of Room to Negotiate, an ongoing filmic-essayistic project investigating spatial isolation, collective memory, and the political conditions of disappearance in Europe.
