Rayna Teneva

Award

Winner of the first Balkan Contemporary Art Prize by Foundation Singer-Zahariev

Through a thin layer of my mother's personal history, an extract from her immigrant life, the project speculates with the idea of creating a collection or archive as a strategy for emotional coping. Beyond the private, the work addresses the collective experience and memory of a generation whose parents left their country in search of economic alternatives in the 90s and 00s. In 2002, my mother gave up her poorly paid teaching profession and left to continue supporting my brother and me. For nearly 20 years, she collected thank-you cards and letters she received from guests at the hotels where she worked. Long or short, banal or offbeat, and almost always with a banknote attached, these messages remain almost the only expression of recognition. My mother's decision to leave her lonely, regulated life in Germany and return to Bulgaria in 2022 marked the moment when this collection turned into an archive. The same year I was commissioned to do a work for a group show with female artists and I used this art making task almost as an excuse to invite my mother to reflect upon and revise those 20 years in personal but also political aspects. As this was hardly happening and I was confronted with my mother’s and my own incapability to speak, I went back to the postcards. In the pile I saw a photograph of my mother during work, maybe taken by a colleague. In the image she holds a textile napkin and smiles at the camera. This textile napkin triggered the clear memory of me and my mother sitting and folding napkins many years ago in Germany. I remember her showing me different folding techniques. I invited her to reenact this moment and in doing so to create a new memory.