A visual poem by BOYAN MANCHEV

in collaboration with Ani Vaseva, Stefan Donchev, Ivan Nikolov and Boyan Manchev / strx

The installation Terra ultima, a limit land, introduces the image of a fantastic North – the limit of the human world, beyond which the subject enters the wilderness of the unknown; a limit of nature, where nature, facing an unimaginable future, emerges from its course. A space of rupture where bodies rise.

Poem about rupture and coincidence, about obsession.

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The visual philosophical poem Terra ultima is an experimental intermedia installation, including photographic, video and digital formats, developed by Boyan Manchev in collaboration with Ani Vaseva, Stefan Donchev, strx and Ivan Nikolov, united by the conceptual line of Boyan Manchev’s philosophical poem The Virtuoso of Life.

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Boyan Manchev’s philosophical poem “The Virtuoso of Life” will be presented on the opening day of Terra ultima in four language versions – in Bulgarian, French, German and English, with the participation of the actors Leonid Yovchev and Marcus Reinhardt.

“The Virtuoso of Life” is a poem about the limit – about Terra ultima. It introduces the images of the North – the stone and the dunes, the starlings and the stars, the colours of the Northern Lights – as the images of the limit of the world, but also of a limit world. Virtuoso’s question is the question of the limit as a form of existence: an existence that exceeds its boundary. The limit as radical autonomy and as the limit of autonomy. Within this limit the Subject meets the unimaginable other, experiences it, sinks into its erogenous relief. Within this limit, the elements themselves insurge as subjects-virtuosos.

The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932-1982), who passed away ten days after his fiftieth birthday, and who was obsessed with the North; the ultimate Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, the author of the Metamorphoses, who mourned his fate in the forgotten paradise of Terra ultima, where time itself had frozen; Dr. Frankenstein’ Monster, assembled of dead bodies and animated by an electric impulse, the Monster who left the world on an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean, are the fictional characters composing the constellation of the Virtuoso of Life.

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This installation has been realised by Metheor with the support of the National Culture Fund and is part of Tempus Fugit, a joint project of Metheor, Goethe-Institut Bulgaria and Institut Français in Bulgaria within the framework of the Franco-German Cultural Fund.

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Maelstrom. Introduction to the Spiral Panic

audiovisual immersive installation

concept: Boyan Manchev and Ani Vaseva
video: Ivan Nikolov, Ani Vaseva and Boyan Manchev
sound: Angel Simitchiev

27 and 28 October 2021, 18:30 – 21:30, Structura Gallery

“Maelström. Introduction to the Spiral Panic” is the first event in a series by Metheor titled “Theatre of the Elements”. This installation has been realized by Metheor with the support of the National Culture Fund and is part of Tempus Fugit, a joint project of Goethe-Institut and Institut Français in Bulgaria within the framework of the Franco-German Cultural Fund.

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It’s as if we’ve never gotten out of the state of spiral panic. The spiral is a paradoxical symbol – it is a figure of sustained motion, of the breaking of the tautology of the circle, of development and change as well as of destabilization, of the loss of centre and base, of giddiness, vertigo, falling into a bottomless chasm.

The terrifying and fascinating image of the gigantic Maelström described in Edgar Allen Poe’s famous short story, “A Descent into the Maelström” (1841), represents the spiral of the vortex at its maximum intensity. The gigantic spiral whirlpool, the vortex in which the ocean plunges into the abyss, is at once a decentering of every structure and appearance of the unimaginable monstrous structure of Chaos. In the spiral acceleration of the vortex, centripetal motion becomes indistinguishable from centrifugal motion, rising from falling, structure from chaos.

Maelström: Chaos – Structure.

Ignoring the clichéd allegories that exploit the spiral-vortex, the installation examines the figural potential that breaks through the swirling surface despite them. It focuses on the point of refraction, of inversion of the spiral’s motion – the inversion of the order of the meanings that swirl with the spiral.

The vortex allows no distance: Maelström wants the body of the observer.

Boyan Manchev

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May 2012, Sofia

The Installation works with archive materials, shaping them into new, textured and tactile material oeuvre, giving new form of the performative.  

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