Guest Playlist #4 - A Decorated Room With Invaded Ideas

         Our fourth Guest Playlist is a result of the collaboration between the art collective behind the 'A Decorated Room With Invaded Ideas' project and Pavel Naydenov - musician & artist, currently residing in Vienna, Austria.
   The long-term project consists of Eline Tsvetkova, Anastasija Pandilovska and Jacob Ehlrich, who met while studying fine arts at Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam. Their intentions are to develop an intercultural dialogue between Eastern and Western Europe on the notion of 'Belonging' and 'Heimat'. One of the curiosities lies in how mentalities can be read from the way people arrange objects in a domestic space and whether the intentions of creating a home is that different from country to country. There's a certain longing for a 'stable' indentity, however, we find ourselves unable to belong unconditionally to one landscape and idea.
   The project is a series of V Phases, as Phase I starts with the residency at the Art Space Æther in Sofia. It will continue in Skopje, Vienna, Zurich and Amsterdam.  

   The first collaboration in the space was with the Bulgarian artist Pavel Naydenov, titled 'From the Private to the Communal and from the Communal to the Private'. It was an interior experiment, as the goal was to create a temporal living room with objects, brought by people and Pavel's personal collection of objects, defining his sense of home. People also have shared the stories behind every object and what makes it special to them. They also have shared a song, connected to the object/ or which they would play in their living room, and that's how the playlist you'll hear below was created. 

    The second event's idea was to create a temporary non-place. Coming out of Marc Augè's book 'Non Places: an introduction to Supermodernity' and asking questions like "What makes space a place? How does space become a non-place? Is there a contemporary utopia and if so how does it look like?" it turned into a grid of black tape, crossing all the walls and the ceiling. The Sofia based musician Anna Bo was invited to create the sound ambience for the performance. 

    The third and final phase will take place today, 4th September, starting from 7PM and it will present artists' own work together with the first draft of the catalogue, which contains collected material they have gathered while working on the project. When asked what are their impressions from Sofians and the homes they have been to, the collective mentions the more practical oriented and focused on 'owning' stuff patterns. A reflection of the city's diversity but also the Balkans' multi-culture. Another thing is westernization of places like shops, bakeries, cafes, and the contrast with the old-style ones - sometimes very abruptive. "It feels like what happened in the west, has happened here in a very short time" - I guess that can summarize it all. 

   All the events took part in The Art Space Æther in Sofia, Bulgaria. 

   The project was made possible by the support of the Federal Chancellery of Austria and the Austrian Embassy Sofia. 

pics by ADRWII