The Thin Skin of the City
excerpt from Georgi Tenev’s article on graffiti art in Sofia
[...] We are walking down Alabin Street, which turns into Gurko Street. We are now standing in the very heart of the city, meters from the point with the main postal code 1000 of the capital. I wanted to bring you right here, at the intersection of Gurko Street and G. S. Rakovski Street. I would like to go back a little – a little in the years, more in the eras. Through a work of art (street art?), deployed right here, where the five huge and clean windows of the bank office now shine. For me, that ephemeral work was an event, the most concise possible story of the changing city in the decades after 1989. The author – Krasimir Terziev. I didn't know if this was its "official" name, but the huge inscription, for me at least, also coincided with the name of the work: GOD PROTECT THE MARKET. I find that for every native Sofian this work is emblematic. I would compare it in importance and scope of impact to Banksy's graffiti on the wall on the West Bank of the Jordan River, in the occupied territories. Or to the more classic interventions on the earlier wall - the Berlin Wall. Because the sealed facade of the former Prague Cafe was exactly that - a wall. For decades, the dead, rotting, blocked from the world and light face of perhaps the most appetizing and representative city facade had been mocking the basic ideas of political and economic transformation - with the belief in the market mechanism for establishing order out of chaos, in freedom after dictatorship. With shacks and guillotines, with a dying
emptiness, this area in the very heart of Sofia (said) something else.
I know the smile with which Krasimir Terziev will greet my opinion:
- From this work, everyone, according to the baggage they are loaded with on the street, will leave with their own images. One – with the pathos of Punk. Another – with the pathos of anti-neoliberal rhetoric. Still others will not notice anything. This is the risk of working with the street.
In 2013, I personally noticed it, to the point of shock. In the huge, irrefutably large-scale, rough-lettered inscription GOD PROTECT THE MARKET, placed on this urban ruin and plague (the annihilated “Prague”), I read something like an epilogue. An afterword to the long and tiring saga. A story about the city’s inability to shake itself off, its crisis, the game of revolutions and privatizations. To self-translate through the bounty of disappointed expectations.
Terziev modestly lands my pathos, the desire to see in his inscription an “emblem of an era”:
– Such an intervention is not something unprecedented. So many artists have worked with text in an urban environment before – whether it be neon, smoke or paint, on a roof or facade… In the center is always evidence of the artist’s hyperactivity.
Thanks to this conversation today, I learn that others have also discovered in the street work from 2013 some kind of explosion of meaning that goes beyond the message related to the financial crisis of 2008–2012. .
– There were people – Krassimir Terziev recalls – who had noticed the intervention without associating it with art. There were people who were frankly outraged or confused. There were also exalted people who flattered me, but the author in the visual arts, unlike in the theater, for example, is always removed from the work, so I have no feedback...
For me, at least to this day, there is no other “view” that shows the inabilities and paradoxes of the “transitional years” as clearly as Terziev’s action on the facade of the “Praga” confectionery did. Was this street art graffiti? We need to go back to the beginning – street art is the subject of constant questioning and interpretation. In this story about walls and people, everything returns to graffiti and is erased/melted by graffiti. Just as it happened with Krasimir Terziev's work:
– The work is in conflict with the environment, demands attention, creates anxiety, does not caress the eyes and the soul, but preserves the freedom of the other person. In the end, the most ironic thing was that the graffiti artist, whose tags I had apparently deleted without realizing it, came along. He came, deleted it and restored them...