“Off-Site” is a practice-based research initiative that curates the production and distribution of diasporic knowledge on art, architecture, and urban studies through alternative forms of exhibition, archivation, and image-making. Employing methods in visual anthropology, cultural heritage studies, and environmental humanities, “Off-Site” explores embodied, material, and spatial forms of change to land, place, and belonging. Centering diaspora as an infrastructure that renders an epistemic edge, “Off-Site” contours new modes of thought, practice, and material urgency.
The first phase of the project, “Off-Site: Diasporic Imaginaries of the Balkan Edge,” frames a series of exhibits that expand outwards from Bulgaria and across other geographies and histories to re-negotiate relationships between states of change – edges, borders, diaspora, migration, and the environment. To date, we have invited eighteen artists affiliated with a diasporic praxis and generated six prompts: “Building Affects, Body in/of the Archive,” “Practices of Care,” “Sonic Knowing,” “Physics of Entropy,” “Liquid Ecologies,” and “Brick Dust Matter.” Each prompt, carefully curated from content to location, centers around a material relationship to Bulgaria. From the gathering of herbal tea, sound recording, video documentation, plant specimen, and material culture, the prompts not only establish a tangible proximity to site but also stage the next phase of the project, one that will invite artists to animate these locations on site.
“Off-Site” is an initiative led by Pauline Shongov, Maya Shopova, and Boris Angelov. This work is supported by Harvard University through the Mellon-funded Collaborative CMP Project grant and the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative. A special acknowledgment to the Harvard Herbaria for mounting and packaging plant specimens for the prompt “Physics of Entropy.” We want to thank the following artists for participating in this initiative: Alen Agaranov, Nicolas Kisic Aguirre, Anna Ulrikke Andersen, Katarina Burin, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Ganavya Doraiswamy, Sam Ghantous, Elitza Koeva, Nicole L’Huillier, Eric Maltz, Mariangela Mihai, Noha Mokhtar, Manar Moursi, Lucas Odahara, Zeynep Toraman, Nancy Valladares, Zhe Wang, Anya Yermakova.