Gulag survivors given voice at Venice Biennale

When Petko Ogoyski was released from communist Bulgaria's gulag in 1953, he built a sixstorey memorial tower in his home village of Chepintsi.

- Kate Connolly

Enraged by the lack of state recognition for the suffering he and thousands of others had endured, Ogoyski - who had been imprisoned for writing poems comparing Soviet rulers to Satan - filled it with artefacts redolent of detention and deprivation.

Two chunks of dried bread representing daily rations. A cloth harness used to move heavy stones in the quarry where prisoners were forced to work. A wooden clog with a hollowed-out heel, used for everything from holding pencils to smuggling notes out of the camp.

Such "DIY spaces of remembrance" are common across Bulgaria, said Lilia Topouzova, a Bulgarian-Canadian scholar who has spent the past two decades collecting the voices of the former prisoners, visiting hundreds of "vernacular museums" in homes up and down the country, including that of Ogoyski, who died in 2019.

"Petko's was the most elaborate, but what all the survivors' living spaces have in common is that there is always a piece of the camp in them," she said.

Topouzova's study, an attempt, she said, to "un-silence" the prisoners, will form the backbone of Bulgaria's pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The museums tell the stories of the silenced survivors of state violence - from artists and LGBTQ+ people, to Turkish, Roma and Muslim minorities, and innumerable others seen as deviants.