We just returned from our annual trip to the Goat Milk Festival, in Bela Rechka, Bulgaria after having the time our lives and making a very beautiful intervention in response to this year’s theme ‘abandonment’.  Abandonment is something that affects everyone, one way or another, and was a great subject to respond to.  In context, in a tiny, possibly dying village in the North West of Bulgaria, it is something that is perhaps more evident than ever.  Someone told me that the average age of the inhabitants was 70, after having met several 90+ years olds and only 2 people under 16, I believed it.  Like many countries, particularly on the edges of Europe, Bulgaria is suffering from the effects of rural emigration.  The young flee the villages in search of opportunities, leaving behind an ageing population and rapidly-decaying infrastructure.  In Bela Rechka it seems every third house is a crumbling ruin, and the sense of abandonment is palpable.

So, how to describe Goat Milk?  It’s a unique festival, kind of the anti-Biennale. You’re not there to show off.  You’re not there to sell anything.  You’re there to meet other artists, thinkers, poets, photographers, musicians, you name it, and to participate together.  There’s not that much ‘art’ on show, there’s a linear programme of workshops, talks, discussions, film screenings (followed by more discussions), and a very long dinner queue at the only place to get food, staffed by incompetent, hungover Bulgarian local lads.  I guess I’m not selling it well, because I think it’s the best art festival I’ve ever been to.  It’s all about the conversations.  Artists from all over the World gather there, unpaid for the most part, so engage in such a wonderfully open and uncompetitive way (for the most part) that the experience becomes a great source of energy, a revitaliser.  Our friend Murat, a drummer and activist from Turkey put it best, ‘we all come together from our different ‘war fields’ and we rest and talk, and realise we are not alone, then we go back, energised, to continue’.  He is pretty dramatic sometimes, particularly after a few rakias, but you get the picture.

So we went over mob-handed, accompanied by Si Walker, as always, Nicky Getgood and her ‘man’, Carl along with Soesen Edan.  We’d decided before we went that we’d try to make an artwork of some kind and had been considering the abandoned houses which were the focus of the festival this year.  We hooked up quickly with Iranian artist Gita, who had a microphone permanently clamped in her hand and was recording everything, and with our friend Antina who grew up locally and had made a beautiful installation, mapping the abandoned houses and interviewing locals to find out their stories.

We looked for a house to respond to and settled pretty quickly on a pretty dangerous looking blue house, which was due to be demolished in a month for safety reasons.  Sandra and myself designed a process for the group to respond to the house.  Working in silence, we would investigate the house, inside or outside. We would respond to a set series of themes, using our sense of smell and touch, noticing patterns and movements.  We would then go and have lunch, without talking about the experience, letting it sit for a few hours, before coming back together to feedback to the group.  It’s harder than you think, you really want to go ‘did you notice, so and so?’ and the resultant feedback sessions produced a series of amusingly arm waving pixelations.  So, much discussion about the house, and the context ensued.  One of the things we had found was a ‘necrolok’ – a poster with a photograph of a deceased person, displayed annually on bus shelters, lamposts, walls, in an effort to remember the dead – we also found the original photograph. I should say at this point that there was much debate on the voyeuristic nature of what we were doing – ‘going through someone’s knicker draw’, as it were, but we trusted ourselves to take a respectful approach and to replace everything where we found it.  At times the house felt like a museum, at others like a mausoleum, and this related directly to the issue at hand.

Bulgarians, we were told, particularly the old, fear being forgotten more than they fear death.  As long as they are remembered, they are somehow still alive, and the necroloks are an obvious example of this.  And here we were in a village, with a population of the old, surrounded by decaying and crumbling houses, all at risk of being forgotten.  We started to formulate a response, a way to commemorate the situation, and an intervention began to take shape.

We made a series of announcements around the festival – ‘look for a sign at 9.45, and bring something to leave behind’, we told people.  There was soon a sense of intrigue, particularly amongst the more adventurous festival goers – though some people clearly wanted to know what was going to happen.  So at 9.45, some of our group gathered with Murat, the drummer, near the Kazan (rakia house – ‘party central’ at the festival) and began to lead an impromptu procession up the lane towards the house.  Swinging lights and lanterns, drumming and dancing, a party atmosphere developed, as we passed the ‘pub’ (the only bar in the village) a bunch of local people joined, to see what all the fuss was about.  As we reached the house Murat’s drumming became softer and the whole ‘audience’, turned to look up at the house.  We’d lit a single window in which we had placed the necrolok poster, the original photograph and a jar of preserved peaches we had found inside the house.  After a while, one of our group stepped forward and laid an object down into a small circle of stones we had made in front of the house.  Then stood up and looked at the house for a while.  The audience needed no more instruction and for the next ten minutes object after object was placed in the circle, each audience or group member then paying their respects to the house, and it’s history.  When the final object had been placed in the circle, the eight members of the group, until then part of the audience,turned around, made eye contact with someone in the audience, then walked towards them slowly, before cupping their face with their hands and leaning forward to kiss them and whisper the word ‘goodbye’, then disappearing into the darkness.  The audience were left with the house to make their own way back.

So that was our response, a simple, beautiful act, yet interrogated constantly over the 30 hour development period in the most complex way.  We made an intervention that respected and responded to the theme, whilst giving ‘entry points’ for the audience to ask their own questions.  We don’t proscribe what these questions may be, and rarely provide ‘interpretation’ or artist statements to explain what the work is about – it’s either obvious, or there’s enough going on that telling people what it is would seem limiting.  This unnamed intervention worked incredibly well – more than one audience member was in tears (we had to administer rakia to one young lady, for medicinal purposes) – in fact, when I demonstrated ‘the kiss’ to our group, out of context, one of our group began to cry uncontrollably.  Everyone understands abandonment, or has been abandoned at some point in their lives, so the theme resonates with us all.  In Bulgaria, the fear of being forgotten is so real that people try and get remembered through leaving traces of themselves.  Our experience in Bela Rechka taught us that we need to remember what has gone before, but perhaps sometimes, we need to learn to let go more readily.

Will post some photos when we get the time.

And in other news

This Friday 3rd of June at the Edge, it’s Sonic Asylum 4 – whoopee!  The usual triple bill of  live musical performances, weird stuff, sonic installations and cake.  And a return visit from  – The Auctioneer!  From 8pm, 3 quid on the door.

Thursday at  the The Edge, Fierce are showcasing work from the Platinum programme, set up to develop live artists in the region.

We are beavering away all week to install our exhibition ‘To You from Super Me’, at the Public.  We’re dead excited about this, it”s a video triptych featuring life size projections of 8 of the young people with autism we’ve been working with for almost a year now.  We love working with these extraordinary young people and wanted to find a way to share what we have learned working with them, so image-maker Chris Keenan, Marvel comics artist John Macrae and ourselves have put together this fantastic installation.  Show opens this Friday and runs for a few weeks in the lower gallery at the Public in West Bromwich, try and make it over.