BULGARIA

Up and Through, 2020. Video, 10 minutes.

Supported by the Arts and Culture Division of the Federal Chancellery of Austria.

Up And Through invents an afterlife for a ruinous hotel located on the Bulgarian Black Sea Coast, by employing it as a staging ground for ordinary and extraordinary performances from contemporary Bulgaria. The film opens with a bucket filled with sea water being drawn up a steep cliff, mimicking the motions of the elevator that was supposed to bring down guests to the sea from the never-finished hotel at the edge of Balgarevo village. Falling inside Natura 2000

— a network of core breeding and nesting grounds to ensure the long-term survival of Europe's most threatened species and habitats — the project was abandoned in the wake of the financial crash of 2008. The film presents scenes that would be familiar in a hotel yet are somehow rendered uncanny by the isolated setting. Towards the end of the video the bucket is emptied out; the water thunders down a drain pipe into a yawning, overgrown pit which once was to become a swimming pool. A string quartet plays a dirge for the failed enterprise as the Sisyphean circle completes itself.