Diana Ivanova

Goat Milk is the name of an international cultural festival,[22] Ivanova, together with the team of the New Culture Foundation[8] organizes every year since 2004 in May as Festival of memories in the village of Gorna Bela Rechka in northwestern Bulgaria.[23] Involved are the almost one hundred more than seventy-years-old residents of the village and artists from different nations – people who otherwise would not meet. In this way, Bela Rechka becomes a place of encounter, where the participants in joint designing the festival share stories, experiences and memories.[24] The project is based on the question whether the cultural differences do separate people fundamentally or whether commonality and understanding are possible. For the inhabitants of the village and the participating guests and artists of the Goatmilk Festival this question already found an answer.[25] At the same time it comes through the festival to a revitalization of this by poverty and loneliness embossed region of the country.[26]

Every year the Goat Milk Festival is dedicated to a theme. 2008 was marked by the replacement of the bell.[27] Although Bela Rechka never had a church, there was a bell in the village. And that was very important for the residents until it was stolen in the nineties of the last century. The Goatmilk Festival paved by help of many artists the way for its replacement. Supported by the Goethe-Institut in Sofia, Bela Rechka 2009 received a new bell.[28] The bell of Bela Rechka was realized within the European program Culture 2000 by the New Culture Foundation in collaboration with the Borderland Foundation (Poland)[29] and the Laundry Association (Birmingham, England).[30] There were also donations and the participation of numerous volunteers.[31]

From 2004 to 2006 Ivanova worked with the poet and writer Georgi Gospodinov and the psychiatrist Rumen Petrov. The focus of their joint project was the question of which traces socialism had left in the souls of men and what influence had these marks on their lifestyle and identity. 171 stories of Bulgarians of different ages were collected. The website on which they were presented, no longer exists; yet they are preserved in a book bearing – in Bulgarian – the title of the project.[32] An online article of The Sofia Echo provides some of the shortened stories.[33]

The project My street began with the waste crisis 2005 in Bulgaria.[34] It was an opportunity to reflect on the importance of the road, in which people live and feel strange or at home. So Ivanova started initially in Bulgaria and later in Cuba bringing people together who wrote down their story with their street, took photos and then in personal encounter shared with each other. Although many at first did not know what to do with the offer, they developed step by step while participating in the project a new relationship with an environment in which they have always lived but previously had paid little attention.

Ivanova was invited along with Boris Deliradev by the British Council in Bulgaria,[35] to develop a concept for workshops with young people on the topic The EU and ME.[36] From the desire to avoid general and superficial conversations on the subject, and under the influence of the then current waste crisis the idea for the project My street took shape. After My street Bulgaria[37] having been successful, the project later in Cuba found its continuation.

Since 1997 Ivanova traveled to Cuba. 2009 she gathered together with the Iranian-Canadian photographer Babak Salari[38] stories and photos of people and their streets. As in all projects the identity of the people were in the focus and the question of how it is influenced by environment and experience.[39] The result was 2010 a first book[40] and 2012 a second one.[41]

Together with Babak Salari[42] Ivanova in 2008 began her research on the project Traumas and Miracles - Portraits from the Northwest of Bulgaria in one of the economically weakest and poorest regions of the country.[13] Inspired by the conviction of the French sociologist and philosopher Maurice Halbwachs, “that all of us unconsciously are ‘an echo’ of events that happened before our time”,[43] the aim of the project was a documentation of the oldest inhabitants of the region and their often traumatic stories. With the intention to create a space “for words, phrases, images, faces that convey a sense of the area”, a “collection of fragments”[43] emerged with portraits and stories of 50 inhabitants in eight villages. 2010 the project was presented to the public with an exhibition at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) in Vienna and in the National Art Gallery in Sofia. Other presentations followed, from 2016 also in Germany.[44]

Ivanova participated in various film projects. For the 2009 released film The Town of Badante Women by Stephan Komandarev she wrote the script.[45] Idea and interviews she contributed to the 2012 released film Father by Ivan Bogdanov, a Bulgarian-, Croat, German co-production.[46] Moreover, she published several short documentaries.

On November 14, 2014 after four years of preparation, her 76 minutes long documentary Listen[47] premiered in Sofia.[48] It reports about Radio Free Europe (RFE),[49] which broadcast from Munich from 1949 to 1995 but was banned in Bulgaria before the change in Europe. From 1995 to 2003 Ivanova had worked there. In Germany the film found his audience, for example, on 11 June 2015, at the America House (Munich).[50] Here, two former employees from Radio Free Europe (RFE) were invited: Luben Mutafoff, formerly journalist there, and Richard H. Cummings, former head of security – both after the film in an interview with the director. Also in June 2015, the movie was shown at Giessen University that thereafter provided an opportunity for discussion with Ivanova.[51] Also in the naTo in Leipzig[52] and in the Brotfabrik in Berlin[53] the film was shown, as well as in the Filmmuseum Potsdam, in Werkstattkino Munich and in Film Club 813 in Cologne. Outside Germany, the film was presented in Kosovo and Luxembourg.[54] The film historian Claus Löser wrote about the film: “Diana Ivanova succeeds in her debut documentary ‘Listen’ a small miracle. She manages retrospectively to soften the entrenched positions of the European postwar order, without playing down the historical and current conflicts.”[55] In the year of its formation Ivanova was awarded with the Best Director Award for LISTEN as best first film.[56] The film was developed with the support of the Bulgarian National Film Center.[57] After completing this film works, Ivanova turned researching the film archive of the Bulgarian State Security to what she received a grant from the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship.[58]

Since 2012 Ivanova organizes and since 2013 she conducts self-awareness-groups in Bonn and Sofia. As method she applies the technique of group analysis. Her interest in this context is it, to give a place to the suffering of people inflicted due to political circumstances on which it could be heard and may be alleviated.[59]