EVERYTHING ELSE IS DUST
photography
What is time for you—past, present, or perhaps the future?
This photographic project, realised in 2011, reflects on time as a force that does not simply erase the past, but leaves it embedded in places, objects, and collective memory. In Bulgaria, the traces of socialism remain visible in abandoned buildings, empty factories, and landscapes left behind, but also in the minds and lives of the people who continue to carry its memory.
After nineteen years of transition, the promise of a different future confronts the reality of economic hardship, unemployment, and abandoned industrial spaces. The remains of a former system become more than ruins; they are fragments of a time that continues to exist between memory and the present.
But what have we learned from the past? Do we have the ability to close one chapter of history and turn the page? Can we free ourselves from what has already happened without erasing it from our memory? And, perhaps most importantly, do we possess the courage and imagination to build a new world from the remains of the old one?
What is time for you? Perhaps it is only movement from one point to another. Everything else is dust.