Zhivka Valiavicharska : Socialist Subjects, Post-Socialist Cultural Conditions, and Neoliberal

Zhivka Valiavicharska : Socialist Subjects, Post-socialist Cultural Conditions, and Neoliberal Development in Bulgaria

In June 2008, a new documentary film “Space for Art” was screened at the Red House Center for Culture and Debate in Sofia, followed by a heated discussion for which key figures from the city municipality and the Ministry of Culture were invited. The film was produced by a new informal and loosely defined association of independent cultural organizations, Familia, initiated by the Cult.bg Foundation. The association emerged to collectively voice concerns about the pressing need for spaces, infrastrucutre, and the tangible lack of resources supporting the contemporary arts. It meant to informally ‘unionize’ the interests of the various independent organizations, run by separate groups of artists on scarce finances and with very uncertain futures, around a common public concern: to claim more visibility, to make a case for the importance of their existence for the cultural life of the capital, and to demand more serious attitudes and continuous support for their institutional survival. Considering the separatist moods and disconnected activities dominating the contemporary art scene in Sofia for much of the last two decades, this collective endeavor opens a stage where collective artistic efforts can formulate a politically meaningful position within their specific context. This paper will examine the assumptions of the claims in this documentary: assuming that the infrastructure is politically neutral and provides sufficient conditions for the development of ‘contemporary culture,’ what kind of politics does such a position endorse? Further, I will inquire why the addressees of these demands appear to be, self-evidently, municipal and state cultural bodies. Finally, I will attempt to identify a collective subjectivity of artists who, while conditioned by former socialist structures of cultural life, nevertheless participate in the neoliberal turn that cultural development in the country has taken.

Zhivka Valiavicharska studied art history and visual studies at the Academy of Arts in Sofia and the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. She was a Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 2003. Currently she is doing her PhD and teaching at the Department of Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley. Her areas of work include modern political philosophy and social theory, postcolonial studies, the histories of Marxist thought, and theories of the subject. Her current projects focus on cultural policy and neoliberal governance in post-socialist Southeastern Europe, and on notions of socialist subjectivity in early 20th century political thought.