Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how modern ruins in Bulgaria attest to the active nature of material decay as one that makes new ways of social and ecological life possible, animated by a contemporary culture of gleaning that re-imagines urban media futures.

Paper long abstract:

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc over the following decade, the Transition Period (1989-Present) in Bulgaria from communism to market economy evidenced the gradual erosion of urban, political, social, and economic structures. The shift towards privatization that satellite states of the Soviet Union witnessed in the aftermath of the Cold War led to instability that has surfaced most visibly in the state of ruination that continues to characterize the urban landscape. To this day, twentieth-century ruins in Bulgaria are as much a means of remembering the past as they are a testament to how the remnants of empire continue to wield power. Drawing on oral history interviews and participant observation that I completed over the past two summers, this paper centers on how living with and through a state of ruin (economic, political) informs the ways in which physical ruins mediate new forms of life. By employing a visual media studies approach to anthropology and contemporary archaeology, the paper traces out a circulation of ruin matter in Bulgaria where an active culture of gleaning includes the gradual accrual of economic and physical sustenance, political authority, and historical memory. The paper finally explores how methodologies in sensory and patchwork ethnography best capture this state of gleaning to help re-imagine the future of the archive and the historical narratives we tell of the post-socialist space.