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Zhivka Valiavicharska
Pratt Institute
Zhivka Valiavicharska is a political theorist and art historian working on the social, political and cultural histories in Bulgaria, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe during the socialist and post-socialist periods in a global context. She is the author of Restless History: Political Imaginaries and their Discontents in Post-Stalinist Bulgaria (McGill- Queen’s UP, 2021). Currently she is Associate Professor of Political and Social Theory at Pratt Institute, New York.
Talk Information:
Plovdiv’s Bratska Mogila as a Microcosm of the 1960s and ‘70s in Bulgaria and the Socialist World
February 3, 2023 | 9:00 AM
This talk offers a historical reconstruction of the Bratska Mogila monument, an exemplary work of architecture and monumental sculpture from the post-Stalinist period in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. A syncretic ensemble of architecture, sculpture, monumental arts, and urban planning, the Bratska Mogila was built in 1974 as a temple to harbor the remains and the memory of young anti-fascist partisans who died in the region of Plovdiv before and during World War II. The monument has arrested the conflicting political logics of the post- Stalinist era and its worldly entanglements in all their monumentality and tension. Through close visual and contextual analysis of the monument, the talk explores post-Stalinist visions of socialism, nationhood, and the global imaginaries of the era.