Postcards and Contraband

The second showing of the now upgraded exhibition took place in Sofia. The exhibition had two sites: one at the Harta Gallery and another installation piece, “The First Ten” by Nikola Stoyanov, on the window display of Posta art space on one of the capital’s busiest boulevards.

“Postcards and Contraband” has its inception in an incidentally found archive from the Bulgarian Customs Agency, Directorate “Struggle Against Narcotics Trafficking,” from the period 1975-1985. The official notes, photographs, negatives, and reports mark parts of the routine of customs affairs, such as the inspection and regulation of transit, as well as the diplomatic image that the Customs Agency must maintain before the international community. These traces are fragments of a vast system of customs regulations, trade routes, and international agreements. The project aims to approach processes that continue to affect Bulgarian culture and politics but have remained traumatically incomprehensible for about 30 years. It is an attempt to read the “transition” period based on declassified and found documents. It focuses on the figure of the border-crossing point as the absolute border on the outer image of the fakely planned and later chaotically based state. The party line of conspiracy bleeds into the wild of democratic society, where mundane reality itself gets re-enchanted into State Secret Service reports. From bananas to guns and drugs, the Bulgarian mind has continued its trafficking operations.

Stoyanov’s work allows one to trace the archival trail of former State Security agents linked to the Captagon trade, whose familial and intra-state ties compromise national security. Taking the form of a conspiratorial web of actual historical affiliations, the installation does not omit the hilarity of the former “mutri” as well as the series of landmark assassinations of the still unfinished “transition.” Employing the Zettelkasten method, the research has been an amalgamation of investigative journalism, archival scrutiny, and found documents from the People’s Republic of Bulgaria Customs Agency. The piece creates an immersive experience reminiscent of an evidence board trope in cinema. By way of this, it weaves together declassified documents, famous photos of assassinations and mafia parties, exposing the illegal trade orchestrated by the Socialist Bulgarian secret services through foreign entities, as well as the fever dream of untangling the web of the not-so-distant past. Blurring the lines between archive fever and journalistic research practice, it delves into the clandestine maneuvers during the “transition” period and the unrealized lustration processes. Similar to hieroglyphs with deeply forgotten Rosetta stones, these images are maps of something obvious in front of us that at the same time has been impenetrably encrypted and can only be understood through the pure delirium of archival fever. Like objects in a computer game, we have a selection of archetypes: the photograph, the report, the pistol, the newspaper, the man shot dead, the convoy at the border, and the map. The player gets only partial knowledge of these, and the whole of missing information, that which has consciously been omitted, becomes the target of the search. Memory rapidly overflows into paranoia, all centering on the grand plot-hole of the not-so-distant past.

Supporting events

On the trail of a banal insight - Discussion to the exhibition “Postcards and Contraband”

Copies of the accompanying book, designed by Zachary Dimitrov can be purchased at: The Kopy Shop

The exhibition is supported by the Singer-Zahariev Foundation and Pernod Ricard Bulgaria.