21 visits to Stoyan

Duration: 3:54
Date: 2019

'21 visits to Stoyan' is a sequential photographic portrait of Stoyan; a man living in the small village of Tsarimir in rural Bulgaria.

The film consists of 21 photographs of the bench outside Stoyan’s house with each photograph is taken at the same time for 21 consequent days. Stoyan, depicted either alone or in the company of a relative or a pet, provides the voiceover pondering on his past and current life, on his desires and regrets.

'21 visits to Stoyan' intents to capture the essence of stillness and timelessness in a remote region of the Balkans through the narration of Stoyan, while exploring idleness and isolation, the breadth and limits of self-reflection and the distant echoes of a past life.

ARTIST STATEMENT:
”From the moment I arrived in the village of Tsarimir in central Bulgaria, I felt that the time had stopped.

Early in the evenings, I would take a stroll through the village’s unpaved streets and come across the same people sitting at the same places I left them the evening before. Even our basic greetings felt like they were part of a surreal repetition that we had all accepted as part of the village life.

At the beginning, it felt that I was walking in a film set where everything was paused, except for me. Soon, it was impossible to imagine that there was life outside this village. I had quickly become one with the village’s timeless settings.
I realised that I started developing a very different sense of time from the one I knew living in big cities. I started to grasp the essence of how irrelevant time really is to our deeper human experience and I wanted to somehow capture this.

One of my daily encounters was with Stoyan, a man I found sitting on a bench outside his house every time I passed by. He never greeted me back but I felt that he had welcomed our daily encounters as part of our routine.

One evening I asked him with gestures if I could take his picture. He nodded and that was the beginning of our photographic series and evolving relationship. For the next 21 days at 7pm, I would visit him at his bench, stop for a moment to point the camera at him and take a photograph before I walked away again until the following day.

On the last day, I sat by his side on the bench and he shared some of his raki with me. Stoyan answered some questions I pre-recorded, which I superimposed on the series of pictures I took.”