Artist, Boyana Djikova is from Sofia, Bulgaria. Her education is in law and art history. She has publications on the website of the Informational portal of nongovernmental organizations in Bulgaria regarding citizen rights, and has also been writing for Artnewscafe bulletin – a digital platform dedicated to contemporary art. From the beginning of 2016 she became part of the team of Gallery 2.0 in Sofia – an urban place for art, people and events presenting Bulgarian and foreign artists in the sphere of contemporary art. In 2018 she curated her first experimental project – the exhibition State of mind. Later that year she enrolled in the Cultural management academy in Goethe institute and the Swimming pool curatorial school in Sofia. She’s interested in the transformations of art and their direct liaison with those of society.
“Coven”
Coming of age and exploring womanhood is like experimenting with drugs for the first time. The godly process of possessing new emotions and tactile sensors and whatever is in your stomach or the adrenaline in the veins comes along with many realisations about self like how running fingers through hair, tangled and untangled, yours or someone else’s feels like.
But it’s a thousand years old tradition of the initiation that put women in cabins and tents away during their periods and had their first “sacred” sexual intercourse turned into a social standard and ultimate life expectation, and God forbid (is there really?) you’re not a virgin.
We now have upgraded tools of womanhood that give us power and relief and means to cope with the concept of being a woman. We put on mascara, do vaginal showers, wash our clothes with aromatising softener, shave our legs. It’s like the items you need to succeed in some sort of a quest or a fairytale or a video game.
At the age of 19 I started living in some sort of a girl paradise / hell, whichever you like best/ a bit like the witches that gather together and cast spells; we spoke about us and only us and drank and put on makeup on and ate croissants in our underwear and observed each other.
Late nights at home with my girlfriends, I learned more about sex and sexuality and womanhood and what coconut oil is good for and diseases and terrors and food and how healthy can ruin your life and STIs and self love and self hate and love in general . We raise ourselves into women on a daily basis although we have no clue how that works (some of us pretend more and better than others). It is each other we learned from, not our mothers and teachers. Why is that?
Becoming a woman means gaining infinite amounts of power and realizing it.
Some of us learn how to be mothers at the same place where others learn how to do yoga poses, that they didn’t really know what love is, that the knew exactly what love is, that threesomes are their thing, that men can dye their girlfriends’ hair. Everyone at their own pace. We built friendships and destroyed them, rejoiced and regretted, talked about art, philosophy and ecology and aesthetics and cried and did drugs and slept and had insomnia.
At the end of the day fears are interior and personal demons and lust are uncontrollable but we build to learn how to deal or surrender. We find ourselves on a daily basis though womanhood. She wears flower dresses, she wears T-shirts and jeans, she wears only silk, she wears only black, is this the same girl or are they many?
One of my roommates decided to sell almost all of her clothes because they’re just things, while the other created her own niche fashion brand. They got tattoos of Salome and Joan, of the circle of life, of the letter V, of dog chasing its tale. They drank only wine or nothing but Pernaud, did coke and LSD or never ever did drugs. Had vanilla sex and had loud strap-on sex. Read Tournier, read Murakami, Jung, Kafka, Bulgakov and De Sad. Sometimes we go to the beach where subtropical plants tear our legs and we try not to step on them wearing long transparent dresses with no bras on because we’re either free or exhibitionists (of youth because it’s the most precious thing we possess). We perceive each other aesthetically and with curiosity like a piece of art or some rare animal that has emerged either from some different era or from the water foam. We’re both objects that leave traces and objects that receive traces. Our bodies are not made of plastelin, though we sometimes wish that were true. But are our minds in a way made out of clay?
Growing into womanhood is the elastic movement of the body but mostly of the mind that we like artisans mold with the aid of the inevitable traces of time. This craftsmanship however is hysterical, irregular and most of all in sync with the outside world. A process of being objectified by interior and exterior forces, of traces left and traces perceived, of traces in the center and the periphery, of traces acknowledged and traces suppressed roughly and forcefully deep into our subconsciousness. Of traces transformed into the creation of the self.
This could be a downhill or a triumph. But somewhere in between the pleasure and the suffering, emerging women gather substance and finally, finally, finally, wisdom.
Witches are those who have the knowledge or the know-how about life and we’re becoming witches.
-By Boyana Djikova
