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VARNA

Video: HD, colour, stereo, 10’, 2024

Concept / Directing / Camera: Adnan Softić
Camera drone: Boyan Ljubenov
Video editing / Sound: Nina Softić
Researcher and content advisor: Nevena Valcheva
 
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



Above the Bulgarian coastal city of Varna stands a monument too heavy to be removed: a stone staging of “friendship” between Soviet soldiers and Bulgarian women bearing gifts. One of them holds nothing in her hands.
This unexplained gesture, described in no archive, stands at the center of the film. The essay film analyzes its image-political function and its afterlife in the present: the monument becomes a stage for a new masculinity, onto which ideology, bodies, and identity are reinscribed in hard-coded forms.
A poetic-analytical essay on a concrete colossus that does not cease to produce meaning, even after its loudspeakers have long fallen silent.