InterSpace Media Art Centre presents” A Tale of Stone and Wood”
InterSpace Media Art Centre in Sofia, screened on 1 April, 2010 “A Tale of Stone and Wood”- a video film by Norwegian Helene Sommer. “A Tale of Wood and Stone” examines the subject of the cinema as a medium of constructing national history, identity and collective memory. The village of Kovachevitsa in the Rhodope Mountain is the artist’s concrete object of study. Nearly deserted in the 1970’s, the village has been re-discovered by the cinema industry, owing mainly to its houses made of wood and stone, that have supplied a magnificent background to historical films with a national-romantic focus such as “Measure for Measure” and “ Manly Times”. The video is essentially a montage of frames from films shot at Kovachevitsa, present-day shots, made by the author and interviews with people, sharing, as they recollect, the stories from the films. The recollections of these films transcend fluently at times into interpretations of historical themes and personal stories. A foreigner to the indigenous cultural context, Sommer explores her object through the medium of translation- language and cultural. Thus, beyond the concrete stories and geographical location,” A Tale of Wood and Stone” is focused on the mark that an image leaves in the mind and the way it affects memory and translation as a factor of interpretation. “ A Tale of Wood and Stone” was made over an April-May 2009 EMARE residency in Bulgaria. InterSpace and Cult.bg were joint hosts of the residency, which was realized with the sponsorship of the Institute for Culture at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Bulgaria and Sofia City ”Culture” Programme. The screening was arranged by InterSpace with the kind assistance of the Embassy of Norway in Bulgaria. InterSpace residencies programme is carried out with the support of the Institute for Culture and is part of the “to do” objectives set down in the agreement with Baden Wurttemberg province, FRG. The expansion of the partnership network and collaboration between organizations and pro-active cultural operators from our country and the international scene is among the priorities of cultural diplomacy. The Institute for Culture at Bulgaria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs relies on an increasingly growing network of partnering organizations, providing access of Bulgarian culture to the international public to cultivate the country’s image internationally.