Temporal Politics of the Surface: Keeping Pace with the Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia

“In Pace with the Times”. Credit: Georgi Pavlov

Abstract: This article proposes a rethinking of the operations of surfaces, using the concept of ‘recursion’ to explore surfaces as not only spatial, but also temporal objects engaged in the production of continuity and rupture through time. The text engages with the transformation of a specific high relief at the Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia, which in the past decade has been subjected to a series of material and semiotic modifications. The analysis of interventions on the relief created between 2011-2018 stimulates an engagement with a set of questions pertaining to the way in which surfaces are engaged in the production of temporal continuity and rupture. To achieve a theoretical intervention in monument, visual and urban studies, the article mobilises cultural topology and media theory, alongside scholarship dealing with Bulgarian post-communist urban space and politics.

Genova, Neda. "Temporal Politics of the Surface: Keeping Pace with the Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia." new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, vol. 106, 2022, p. 25-42. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/863660.

Caption: “In Pace with the Times”. Credit: Georgi Pavlov.