Reconciling Immigration Discourses Through Art with Marta Djourina
Marta Djourina, portrait by Alena Schmick.
Born in Bulgaria and having moved to Berlin, Germany to study art at the age of 18, Marta Djourina follows the journey of light. She performs the compositions of movement, travel, and time to create light reflections on photosensitive paper. In the lab, she finds solitude, while the road presents her with the opportunity to choreograph the dynamics of immigration, longing, and nostalgia.
In her project Travel Light, for instance, she uses a pinhole camera within a suitcase to capture images of the airport space as she travels to and from her home country. As the suitcase passes through scanners at multiple airports, it symbolizes the conscious points of departure and return, highlighting themes of travel, relocation, and pursuing personal dreams in a country that offers more opportunities than one's homeland. The pinhole camera, a precious tool in Djourina’s practice, transforms into a collaborator and a partner that captures and transmutes the shadow.
Her work, therefore, follows the artist’s path of engaging with and reconciling personal and global discourses.
In my conversation with Marta Djourina, we spoke about both elements of her work—the light and the shadow—to frame how elevating one’s creative work and struggles with immigration can contribute to a global narrative.
EH: Your work revolves around manipulating light in a dark room. What is the process like for you and how did you decide to transition from working in the lab to a more dynamic setting?
MD: The whole experience of working in the darkroom is quite solitary. I also work in complete darkness; there is no red bulb. It’s a very special moment, spending time alone with the lights, performing a choreography that has evolved over time.
However, working with these light-sensitive materials in large sizes meant that I was dependent on having access to a darkroom. I wanted to end this dependency relatively early on in 2015. After an exchange semester in Glasgow, I sought residencies without darkrooms to develop independent methods.
I also travel to Bulgaria frequently due to family reasons. This constant travel between the two locations has been on my mind since I moved to Berlin in 2009, so I wanted to turn it into a project.
EH: When did you develop your first artwork that uses travel as a prerequisite?
MD: In 2012, I developed the From Me to Me project. I was really fascinated by the idea that my name exists in parallel in two places in the world, even though I cannot be in both at once.
During my first years away from home, I felt quite alienated, and this nostalgia, combined with my interest in traveling the distance, formed the conceptual basis for this work.
I sent one pinhole camera, the size of a small box, between these two locations every month for a year. The camera was active from the moment I left my door to mail it until it returned. The developed photos represent an accumulation of time, serving as time archives that captured random traces of the light in the postal van or the outside of my student dorm, changing with the season.
I've been increasingly interested in memories, and I feel like I'm starting to need to grasp moments because they're just disappearing.
Marta Djourina, Travel Light, 2023-24, aluminum cast of the original pinhole camera. Exhibition view of EE Tetris, Scope BLN, 2023. Photo by CHROMA.
EH: Is the idea of holding onto memories related to your work of traveling with a pinhole camera hidden in a suitcase?
MD: I believe so. The From Me to Me project was the basis for Travel Light. It started with an invitation to exhibit in my hometown, which is dearly important to me.
I decided to turn this constant state of traveling into a productive process. So, I left Berlin with nothing. I turned both my suitcases—my checked bag and my hand luggage—into pinhole cameras. I was quite nervous because photography is prohibited at airports, but fortunately, it passed. The checked bag was apparently too light, so the travel agents almost didn't want to take it. When I arrived, I developed the images, and whatever was on them was what we exhibited: the two suitcases and the two images of traveling.
Marta Djourina, Travel Light, 2023-24. Exhibition view of Minding Sun, FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph. Photo by CHROMA.
EH: Would you say that the suitcases allow you to pack away your emotions and deal with them later? Is it almost like the suitcases are doing the emotional processing for you?
MD: I can definitely relate to that. The suitcases are both collaborators and partners, accompanying me in my travels between my two homes. This is usually a sad process of saying ‘goodbye’ and adapting to the new place. Stripping everything down to fit into these empty plastic boxes was quite a shock. Even though I’m going home to my family, I don't have my own place there, so I have to work with whatever is there and borrow objects. Culturally, we are accustomed to hoarding and collecting things, finding comfort in having belongings with us.
I experienced two types of emotional paths: feeling overwhelmed by being completely alone with nothing that I could hold on to, and letting the suitcases do the work, whether it was emotional work or artwork.
EH: Your Travel Light project didn’t only document your travels back and forth to Bulgaria, but also your journeys to Paris and New York, correct?
MD: Yes, the project was extended from thinking about my hometown to putting the focus on this constant travel that artists experience through residencies.
Artists must leave their comfort and homes to go to places that can be far away, uncomfortable, and lonely, all to find the time to focus on their practice.
For me, Paris and New York—cities where I completed several months-long residencies—had this kind of meaning and became an extension of the Travel Light project.
Marta Djourina, Travel Light, 2023-24, B&W exposures, unique pieces made with a suitcase turned into a pinhole camera in transit during flights between Berlin and Sofia, New York and Berlin and a train between Paris and Berlin; bag labels. Exhibition view EE Tetris, Scope BLN, 2023. Photo by CHROMA.
EH: Do you feel ungrounded as an artist? Can you say whether Berlin or Sofia is your home, or do you feel that your roots are spreading to many places wherever the residencies take you?
MD: I wouldn't say I'm spread out. I'm literally just halved between Sofia and Berlin, and I've done my best in the last few years to build a path in both cities. Even though, going back to Bulgaria always makes me feel like a foreign body there. I'm waiting for the moment when I will have spent 18 years here and 18 there. I really have to do some sort of project on this.
EH: Yes, that would be very exciting. Listening to you, I get the impression that you feel more like an immigrant in your home country of Bulgaria than you do in Germany. Is that true?
MD: It’s strange because during my first years in Berlin, I really felt like an immigrant. I tried to adapt and almost scratched everything that was Bulgarian. I studied art history at a very German university, with only a few foreigners and quite a bit of discrimination. When you meet someone, one of the first things they ask is where you're from. It might seem silly, but daily discrimination makes it hurtful. Eastern Europe has a strong stigma. This pushed me to try to adapt more, to speak better in German, and to almost completely hide my accent, though I think accents are such a beautiful thing.
Eventually, I managed to flip the narrative and saw this second background as a huge advantage, which gave me a lot more strength. I also realized that it's extremely important for me to visit Bulgaria more often and to invest more in my artistic practice and network there.
I haven't packed and wrapped this experience up in a piece of art yet.
EH: That might be because you didn't feel the need to create an artwork around it to process it, or perhaps you were more affected by the idea of traveling, leaving, coming back, and feeling ungrounded?
MD: There are a lot of emotions involved in constantly traveling between the two places, and it never gets easier. Perhaps it’s because there's a lot of energy you have to invest in leading two parallel lives. This emotional side of mine was definitely the starting point for trying to package these experiences into my work.
EH: How do you see your practice evolving in the future with regard to the topics of traveling and immigration?
MD: Instead of looking back to nostalgia and history, I think we should focus on what's happening with us now.
Traveling is a big question mark because of sustainability, and I’m still figuring out how to handle it. I’m really interested in alternative toxin-free methods, because there is a lot of toxicity and overuse of plastic in the photography industry.
Yet when it comes to traveling home, I always fail to find a different method, because Eastern Europe is not connected to Western Europe by train. So even this is such a huge topic, right?
We can’t simply pack up and take a train home, we have to fly. I feel quite guilty about the CO2 emissions from my frequent flights, especially when I used to be in Sofia almost every second month.
EH: So you have to decide whether to prioritize your own comfort and longing for home or your commitment to the planet. Which home do you put first?
MD: Exactly. It’s somewhat of a catch-22, but I’m glad I get to explore such important topics through my practice. Through my recent projects, I’ve discovered ways to add my unique perspective to social phenomena, such as belonging, migration, and traveling. Recently, I’ve also focused on climate-related topics. For example, I contributed to a large public art installation as part of the project “Look into my Ice” at the facade of the Ice Age Center near Tartu in Estonia as a part of Tartu 2024 European Capital of Culture. The project focuses on the disappearance of the world’s ice and sets a memorial of the already lost in the shape of a unique photographic method.
You Might Also Like:
Migration in Dialogue – Michi Zaya
Queen JustMean: Disrupting Gender Norms Through Performance Art
