As part of the Buna 2 Festival (2024), You’ll Understand when the Time Comes emerged as an urban intervention and installation, interrogating the boundaries of art, repair, and decay it navigated the murky territory between spontaneous urban repair and conspiratorial paranoia. You’ll Understand when the Time Comes an illegal destructive growth in the hearth of a city, that is always being built up and never accommodates its inhabitants. Constructed entirely from discarded, abandoned and readily available construction materials—metal brackets, fasteners, and discarded fragments—the piece embodied Bulgaria’s deeply ingrained DIY repair culture. This culture, rooted in the improvisational ethos of late socialism, reflects an ongoing negotiation with scarcity, a “make-do” survival strategy that transforms remnants of functionality into provisional solutions.

The installation stood as a meditation on the precarious life of art when it is unviewed, unprotected, and unacknowledged. What becomes of the work when it is untethered from the structures of presentation? Stripped of its institutional framing, the piece was left vulnerable, its existence renegotiated nightly. Unsupervised and exposed in a desolate area of the city center, it invited destruction, sabotage, and entropy. Yet, through these acts of vandalism, You’ll Understand when the Time Comes transformed. Each night’s damage was met with the artist’s intervention—a repair not aimed at restoration, but at evolution. New elements were added, scavenged from the streets or reconfigured from its remnants. The work became a site of continuous becoming, a loop of destruction and reassembly, embodying the inexorable temporality of both urban space and artistic labor. It stood as both a meditation on the publicness of art and a visceral critique of the city’s unrelenting cycle of construction, neglect, and decay.

As an “illegitimate” structure growing unchecked within the city, the piece paralleled the landscape it inhabited. It was a wound in the urban fabric, perpetually healing and reopening, accruing layers like the calluses of overgrown scar tissue. A malignant vitality, an organism thriving not in spite of, but because of its dysfunction. The work’s irregular evolution reflected the paradox of a city constantly under construction yet persistently uninhabitable. The street bearing a fruit in the form of a alien monolith.

You’ll Understand when the Time Comes also engaged the cultural legacy of the improvised, the temporary, and the unresolved. Drawing from the residue of socialist-era materiality, the installation referenced the paradoxical endurance of structures built to fail: provisional repairs made permanent, improvised fixes that stabilize but never resolve. This ethos of “make-do” permeated the work, emphasizing art’s precarious existence when stripped of its privileged position as an object of contemplation.

Throughout the festival, the piece invited interaction not as an autonomous art object but as a collaborative artifact of the street. It adhered to what Lefebvre might call the “spontaneous appropriation of space,” allowing passersby, vandals, and scavengers to become unwitting co-creators. This dialogic relationship destabilized the conventional artist-viewer hierarchy, reframing the installation as both an artifact of collective agency and an embodiment of urban entropy.

At the close of the festival, the piece vanished. Only its anchoring metal ropes remained, suspended like spectral traces of a body that had slipped away. Whether dismantled, stolen, or subsumed into the city’s economy of salvage, its absence echoed the central tension of its existence: the unending negotiation between creation and disappearance, between the visibility of art and its erasure. In the end, You’ll Understand when the Time Comes dissolved into the city that shaped it, leaving behind a lingering unease—a reminder of art’s impermanence, the fragility of public space, and the unrelenting persistence of things left to their own devices.

Covedge

Bulgarian National Television, Bulgarian National Radio, Bulgarian Telegraph Agency, 24 Hours,Varna Tommorow, Cultural News, Dnevnik Vij, BNT

Critique

Записки по варненските буни - Нора Голешевска След фестивала БУНА във Варна - Яна Костова