FOURTH KILOMETER

2013

Photographs and a documentary film

Photographs:

Colour archival pigment prints on Hahnemuehle Fine Art Baryta

Large images: 125x100 cm.

Small images: 50x40 cm.

Film:

31 min., Colour, HD

English version with subtitles and credits

The Fourth Kilometer project by Missirkov/Bogdanov initially started as a commission by Sofia Tech Park. Their task was to document these 670 acres of former military compounds in Sofia before the construction of a Scientific and Technological Park begins in this area. 

The result of their two-month work in the summer of 2013 goes well beyond the framework of traditional documentation. Missirkov and Bogdanov have approached the task like archaeologists doing field research. Every single object they find – a reminder of human presence, a graffito left on the wall during long hours on duty, an officer’s cap forgotten by the window – is turned into an artifact in their photographs. The viewer gets immersed into a space long abandoned by man and time that is quietly anticipating its future transformation.

The artists' choice of using traditional large- and medium-format film brings back the nearly forgotten richness of the classical photographic imagery. The camera gets closer and closer and the detail comes into the foreground. The exhibition rooms are dominated by these painterly large-format prints that decode the surfaces of the abandoned barracks and give them the leading role, turning the space into an abstraction. The sets of smaller situational photographs provide the context, while the voices of unknown officers, servicemen and recruits coming from the film's soundtrack fill the space with the sound of their stories and recollections of the past. As a whole, Missirkov/Bogdanov's Fourth Kilometer project is both a document of the Socialist past and a very intimate and touching, very personal work.

Nadezhda Dzhakova, curator at Sofia Arsenal - Museum of Contemporary Art