Far Away From Home: The Voices, The Body and the Periphery.

Concept, photography and text by Hristina Tasheva. Short Story by Lucette ter Borg.

Self Published, 2023. English, 456 pp., 8¼x11¾".

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2023 by:

Viory Schellekens

Shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture PhotoBook of the Year Award.

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I was born in 1976 in communist Bulgaria (1944-1989) and raised with the belief in the communist ideals: public ownership in a classless society free of capitalist oppression and ruled by the working class, where everyone contributes according to their ability and receives according to their needs; equality and brotherhood among nations; free education and healthcare; common means of production... In 1989 the communist utopian experiment came to its end in Bulgaria, followed until today by poverty, corruption, and unprecedentedly high levels of emigration toward the West.

I have been living in the Netherlands for 20 years now, which is governed by a parliamentary democracy. I walked the path from illegal immigrant to a holder of Dutch nationality and I am still struggling to find my place in society – this is the main subject of my artistic practice.

'Far away from home: the voices, the body and the periphery' is a project inspired by a heated debate that took place some time ago. In public, a Dutch citizen with an academic background asked me: "Are you a communist?"

To understand what it means to be a communist, I have chosen to place the word in its historical contexts in the Netherlands and in Bulgaria.

Before, during, and after WWII the Dutch government had seen a conqueror and a great danger in the face of the communist ideology. The Dutch communists played an important role in the Resistance during the war (when the Netherlands was occupied by Nazi Germany), and many lost their lives in prisons and Nazi concentration camps. They did not, however, receive real recognition for their deeds after the Liberation and were excluded from the ruling government.

In Bulgaria, the communists, with the help of the Red Army, became the main ruling political power after the war, which today is declared criminal and totalitarian. Nevertheless, at present, a big part of the political establishment has ties to the former communist State Security Service, applying the 'old' (originating from the past) methods of governance. This results in a lack of public memory about the existence of forced labour concentration camps in Communist Bulgaria.

When coming back to the question of my relation to communism, I took these two historical contexts into consideration. On the one hand, I researched the participation of the Dutch communists in the Resistance in the occupied Netherlands and their persecution during WWII, and on the other the criminal deeds of the Bulgarian communists aimed at realising the communist utopia in Bulgaria after the war. Being in between these two contexts, I asked myself: "Do the local people see me as a victim (resistance fighter) or a perpetrator? Am I what they think of me?"

To answer these questions, I started an investigation of the historical events by 'walking' in the footsteps of the Dutch and Bulgarian communists. The information for my artistic research is drawn from the collective and individual memory that can be found in both countries: archives, literature, testimonies, academic research, and my own experience and fieldwork.

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