Resign OCTABKA! was created for FemLink (Paris), an international video-collage project under the title 'Protest'.

This 2-minute video-sound work was an intuitive response to the Protest theme.  I was at the time of shooting (September 2013) travelling through Bulgaria with an exhibition.  Whilst walking the streets of Sofia, protesters were raiding the streets flying banners, shouting chants in demonstration against corruption and self-seeking oligarchs controlling the ruling parties.  The country has seen political instability and fragmentation through huge coalitions, raising civil unrest and driving people to the streets shouting OCTABKA (Resign) slogans.  The video records the spontaneity of this event grabbed through hand-held phone clips and photographs.  I wanted to keep the raw documentary feel of these street clips, augmenting this with contrasts of the stone footage.  The intermittent stone film is a poetic rendering, slamming rocks against one another, splintering in the air.  The tempo has been deliberately altered.  The smashing stones parallel political clashes.  In the space of 2 minutes the film flits from colour shots to black and white breaks juxtaposing fact and metaphor.  Protesting 'ostavka' (Bulgarian for Resign) fills the sound track.  This repeated street chant becomes a mesmerising drone, similar to the way people are mesmerised by political ideologies.