The year 2020 has changed many people’s views not just of normal life but also of what we call a normal place and normal time. Normal life has, for a long time, been reduced to staying at home, and for much of the population, their place by the window has been the only direct contact with the outside world.

We thus ask ourselves even more questions about what is and what is not normal, and whether all of us halting our lives at once can result in any fundamental change in how we perceive our immediate surroundings. I am convinced that the time we are currently living through is causing a fundamental change of perspective in society – our gaze no longer wanders around but has finally come to rest in place.

A NEIGHBORHOOD WITHOUT A VIEW
Monastery Meadows West, one of Sofia’s most expensive neighborhoods, is located near the Vitosha massif, which forms an imposing backdrop to the entire city. Although housing prices are the same or even higher than in the city center, few homes offer a view of the mountain, whose uniqueness has earned it the status of national park.

Until the 1980s, this neighborhood was considered the end of the world. It consisted of just a few small houses, rows of fields, and meadows and marshes that were home to many different animals. Today, however, this fauna and flora is almost all gone. After 1989, as the previously nationalized land was restituted to its previous owners, almost all the property became privately owned. Partially because there was no plan to regulate construction, the new neighborhood developed chaotically. At the time, Bulgaria had poor regulations regarding the aesthetic character of new construction, and many buildings look accordingly. Each architect realized his own vision, but nobody was interested in the neighborhood as a whole or in a comprehensive approach to the locality. Small, older houses found themselves squeezed between large blocks, and a chasm in lifestyle began to open up. Property owners and developers built one building after another with no regard for their surroundings, and nobody’s plans took public space, streets, or sidewalks into account. The neighborhood was thus turned into a modern luxury ghetto with problematic infrastructure and without a joint vision for the future.

THE PRIVATE VIEW

What view do the local windows and balconies have to offer? What do the neighborhood’s residents look at all day?

Except for two children’s playgrounds, there are no cultural institutions, no sports facilities, no shared garden or grassy area, nearly no greenery at all. Many streets lack sidewalks, and pedestrians have to wind their way among parked or moving cars. Cars are parked almost everywhere, and children usually play in the abandoned spaces that have been left over. The only view everyone has in common is cars parked in front of their houses.

THE SHARED VIEW

In my work, I usually try to find some visual obstacle that can become an element for bringing people together. Problematic areas usually have a whole number of obstacles, but not each is capable of this transformation, of bringing together local residents while also changing how it is viewed. Some obstacles everybody is aware of; others cannot be seen at all.

At first glance, you won’t find anything on the streets of Monastery Meadows West. But if you look closely, what you notice is the hundreds of cars parked on every available free surface.

CARS PARKED IN FRONT OF THE HOUSE have become such a normal part of our lives that we have not only ceased to see them as a problem, we have also suppressed all possibilities of using them differently. A parked car is no longer a means of transportation. It is a private object that takes up a lot of shared space. Because of the parked cars, even that small part of public space that was left over in the neighborhood has become private. With this fact in mind, I would like to try to change a purely private thing into a shared object and, through a participatory project, to expand the local residents’ idea of public space. The project should be a form of GROUP THERAPY in which we the object obstructing public space becomes a way of transforming this space while bringing the local residents together.

THE VIEW FROM ALL SIDES
My project will try to get the local residents to use their parked cars for two-day events during which they can get to know one another but also try to change the place they live in.

During the project, every car will become a “time machine” that directs the people’s thoughts to the future of the neighborhood while also becoming an exhibition space for sharing their ideas of what the neighborhood might look like and choosing the best ideas that can be realized. The choice of best car will not be based on its make, model, or performance, but on the ordinary view from the window.

The Curator’s Statement:

The city game A Place by the Window, created by Kateřina Šedá for Monastery Meadows West neighbourhood, inspires the imagination of the residents. It gives them tools of self-expression and the opportunity to be the designers of their own living environment by transforming their indignation of the daily problematic conditions into colourful pictures of future projects, feasible or unrealistic.  

Monastery Meadows West is a neighbourhood located in the southwest of Sofia, and according to the city research data is the better-off part of the capital city[i]. Its population consists mostly of young people pursuing modern careers, and there are many more active businesses with open offices here. This may be the reason why housing properties in the district sell at high prices, and the listings of real estate agencies read the definitions of “luxury” and “modern-look” for the available flats and new buildings in the area.  All of this is in stark contrast to the actual environment and living conditions in the neighbourhood, where the conflict between public and private is immediately visible to the eye. The lack of proper regulations and the hasty sale of land plots over the years have resulted in overdevelopment of area. Today, Monastery Meadows West consists of a large number of housing cooperatives varying in size, architectural style and appearance, with little space between the buildings. The absence of sufficient parking spaces and parking lots has reduced the streets to a numberless string of parked cars. Such conditions make driving very difficult, cause monumental congestions, and pedestrians and cyclists weave each their own way through the traffic on the narrow roadway. The lack of basic infrastructure such as pavements and parking lots makes people face an actual daily battle for space and right of way, hinders their access, and forms invisible but distinct hierarchies and marginal groups. The cars push to the side mothers with strollers, children, disadvantaged people and adults, all of whom happen to be the non-competitive and “weak” ones in the battle on/for the street.

In this case, „the right to the city“[ii] has been expropriated on account of the confrontation of various private and individual interests, which effectively set people against one another – drivers against pedestrians and mothers with children, etc. The space was seized by private property and related investments which left minimum areas for walking and recreation. Lonely benches placed within particular residential complexes face the parked cars or the street, here and there small fenced gardens are formed and are being grown like a bonsai between the blocks. There are only a couple of larger-size sports grounds with a few benches and several small children’s playgrounds. There are no municipal schools, kindergartens or libraries, so public meeting places are fully limited.

The individual movement routes in the place are incorporated in the way of life and create both fragmentation and plotting of the outdoor environment, and alienation between people. Everyone finds themselves isolated with their family in their own flat. There is almost no community life in the condominiums and this shows from the poorly maintained common areas, the absence of self-made gardens on the bare concrete sills, and the shared spaces surrounding each block. People live their own lives, in their own spaces. The common areas outside serve only for passing through, so they look like a warehouse or a basement – a place to put away unnecessary stuff, a messy place to stack things and forget them. A symbol of this upside-down situation are the overflowing garbage containers and dusty streets. The residents dislike the place and, consciously or not, express their dislike with a complete disregard. The private displaces the common, their own attitudes included.

Kateřina Šedá’s project A Place by the Window successfully captures this particular atmosphere and finds simple but adequate tools to intervene in its “normality”. The artist works with what is most apparently present, respectively absent, in the neighbourhood – the view that is not there, and the cars that are everywhere. The car is actually a continuation of the individual space of a flat. In the car, people are alone with their families and/or friends again. Giving them marker pens, the artist sparks their desire to share and communicate. In a “childish” drawing game, the residents of Monastery Meadows West neighbourhood are enticed to the idea to think about and imagine the common, and to transform the abandoned spaces into colourful projects for the possible future. Imagination in this case is a form of power that re-establishes people’s right to have access and live at ease in the city.

“An artist has to work with what is available as there are too many things already” says Kateřina Šedá about her works, adding that she has the desire to change the environment. A potential for transformation of the place is also found in the project A Place by the Window, which, by addressing each person individually, effectively creates a community through the mental restoration of the connections between people disrupted by the space.

Vladiya Mihaylova

[i] Research reports as part of “Vision for Sofia” strategy. https://vizia.sofia.bg/vision-sofia-2050/

[ii] By Henri Lefevre