Hybrid strategies, universal practices

Maria Vassileva


When I started writing this text I thought about the roots of the word InterSpace or rather of the two words it contains. I thought it symptomatic that the main meaning of “inter” in English is in fact “to bury”. With their appearance in 1998 the members of InterSpace truly “laid into the ground” the past century and jumped into the current one.

Of course there can be nothing as definitely black and white in the age when technological progress is so obviously ahead that the simultaneous co-existence in different spaces and time levels has become nothing unusual. The age of the Internet did away with the conceptual systems of the past along with their total ideas of center, hierarchy and linearity.

Similarly InterSpace provides access to different levels without one of them being more significant than the other. Maintenance of a web art portal, a database on Bulgarian artists, mailing list, building web-pages for galleries, authors and groups, organisation of courses, interactive public performances at home and abroad – these are part of the things which InterSpace offer, giving us the opportunity to make our own way, to find our won paths and access to them. InterSpace is a different (or at least according to my generation) model of communication, not based on structuring levels of values and some struict hierarchy, but on free choice. This hybrid strategy expands the borders of art as a term and turns it into an infinitely broad and till recently unfamiliar area of activity where painting and video co-exist side by side, as do illustration and advertising, poster and comics design, sculpting and net-art.

In my mind Interspace is a jigsaw of all of these elements and neither of them are most essential. And strangely enough, even if one of them should disappear the whole image would not fall apart.

Every time I visit the office of Interspace I am impressed with the strangeness of the place – dusky, people at computers who pay no attention to newcomers and say very little, and when they do they talk in strange shorthand. One of the last times I was there the server for culture and the arts, cult.bg was lying in pieces on top of a desk. And I saw it – the mortal, physical body made up of all kinds of mundane parts. And it was strange that because of that one small thing there the entire Internet was deprived of an entire world with its own dramas, comedies and dialogues. For as someone quite wisely stated, the new age is not the age of revolution of computers but of communication.

Cult.bg (forgive the romantic weakness of separating the private from the whole) took on the task of filling in many gaps – the lack of a museum and archive for contemporary art, lack of some listing or newsletter of what’s on, lack of reviewers’ columns and a free forum for exchange of thoughts and ideas. And despite that we are often displeased with the quality of criticism and especially with the level of discussion, it would be hard to imagine our actual existence without cult.bg.

Cult.bg does not simply register events. It provokes us to a way of thinking and communicating with the provided censor-free comment system by its own openness to a broad range of art events covered. And by the way, for those who follow the discussions in the cult.bg, you’d know that this type of communication is far from easy. Also because of the fact that many who would be otherwise “excluded” from the still very centralized structure of our art society, take part in the discussions here. It may take a few years before we find the common tone of voice. I am convinced though that today’s efforts will be tomorrow’s results. For as Stephen Darland says, “the world is far too small nowadays to build ivory towers.”