A Market (the levels of the river Danube)

An illegal market in the centre of Sofia. Passing through the Stochna Gara area on a Saturday one can observe or participate in the “black” market, which takes place in the bed of the Perlovska canal. An unregulated concentration of strange people and goods with untraceable origin and purpose, samples of most inconceivably useless and forgotten objects of human production. Always overcrowded, this market is a place of complex social relations: despair, ‘free’ labour, memory/ nostalgia/ amnesia, consumerism and ingenious survival techniques. The market is situated in the centre of a roundabout, below the level of the ‘normal’ street traffic. The ‘arena of the spectacle’ is observable from above.

The irrational and spectacular spatial situation that the market created led me to working out my own system in order to interpret what was happening. Somehow I recognised the river Danube in the canal, and in the figures announced in the National radio broadcasts of the levels of the river Danube in centimetres, which I remember from my childhood, I recognised as levels of commercial transactions/stock exchange indexes taking place at this market.