Project description of Exchanging Places

In Someone Else's Skin

Dimitrina Sevova

Mixed-media installation, polaroid pictures and digital prints, interviews on transparent foil in Bulgarian and English.

My partner in the exchange was Marilena Preda-Sanc in Bucharest. I knew her from before the project, but I had never visited Bucharest, even though it's so close to Sofia. Landing at Bucharest airport and taking a taxi to the center of the city, I was shocked by how similar and well-known everything looked. I felt as in a dream, or as if coming back to a place I'd been to before, where I've lived before. A place I know much more about than is superficially visible. A place I know the mechanisms of, the confusions and paradoxes of being and self-identity. Partly, in direct communication with people, this feeling broke apart - the concrete stories always change the landscape. Temporarily living in Marilena's studio I was able to explore things she had touched, her work, to open her favorite books, to take a guess at other little secrets of her's. And at nights to fall asleep on her small bed sofa, feeling as if on my own small bed sofa in my studio on the sixteenth floor of a sixteen-floor block in Sofia.

Additional materials: Bucharest Slide Show (coming soon)

The Exhibition

Slide Show documenting Dimitrina Sevova's and Marilena Preda Sanc's installations in the exhibition