I met Sophia at a fundraiser organised by Collect4Ukraine, an Amsterdam-based collective that gathers donations for Ukraine and organises events for the local Ukrainian community and their supporters in the Netherlands. With her burning red lipstick, folk flower scarf, black skirt, and a huge pot of (vegan) borscht, Sophia is not someone you can easily miss. But as much as her pagan-goddess-like appearance radiates light on those around her, it is her art that truly moved me, and only deepened my experience of who she is, what she’s doing, and what she stands for. Because like, what’s up with the pipes?
Sophia Bulgakova was born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1997. She’s an interdisciplinary art scientist and activist who creates within the intersection of art, technology, and social structures. Her works explore identity, perception, and imagination, guiding the audience to follow her thread, keeping them curious and interested by encouraging them to make an effort, to seek a little deeper, to care. Her installations and performances engage the viewer through sensory stimuli and affect the way they are physically able to perceive the reality presented to them.
Sophia and I never really talked properly before, so it was a pleasure to finally sit down with her and ask what her art means to her, and how she connects the personal with the artistic:
I think that was my struggle for a really long time, to be honest, to connect my daily reality, who I am as a person, to my work. For a long time, during my studies, I was doing a lot in general, but afterwards, my work concentrated specifically on perception, the phenomenology of perception — how and why we see things on a very abstract level. The more I grew, the more my work grew. It’s this kind of universality that translates my (very) personal experiences.
Sophia grew up in Ukraine and later moved to the Netherlands to study at the ArtScience Interfaculty at the Royal Academy of the Art and Royal Conservatory in the Hague. She previously studied sculpture in Kyiv and Photography and Time-Based Media at the University of the Arts London. When the full-scale invasion started, she was in Portugal:
I was studying in the Netherlands from 2015 to 2019 and then I stayed in the Netherlands for a while. I was in Ukraine during the pandemic for a few months, but in 2021 I came back to the Netherlands. I was in Ukraine for New Year’s Eve 2022, when everybody was talking about the war, whether something’s gonna start or not. I was there with my ex-partner, and when he went back to Belgium, I stayed in Ukraine. I felt like I needed to go to Odessa. I don’t know why, but I did, and so I went. I left Ukraine on the 20th of January, a month before the full-scale invasion started, and still, nobody believed anything would happen. Everybody was kind of strange, though. The atmosphere was weird, but everything was running at full speed. When I came back to the Netherlands, I started getting more and more anxious. I had this show in February in Portugal, so I was in Lisbon when the full-scale invasion started. I was having dinner with the organisers of the exhibition and some friends who were also a part of our show. There was a press conference with Russia, with Putin, when he announced that he recognised the Donetsk and Lugansk republics — I was like, oh, no, we’re cooked. I was really distressed. And then somehow, the next day was quiet, like eerily quiet. I was asking myself — why is it so quiet? What’s happening? A day later, I woke up because my friends were calling me, my parents were calling me. But I was in Lisbon, and I had no idea what to do. I told myself there was no point in running anywhere because I couldn’t go back to Ukraine. It wasn’t possible. Everybody was in absolute shock.
After that her work changed. She was in a phase of perfecting works that she had started during her studies, but after the full-scale invasion started, she began to work more through these kinds of very phenomenal, very immaterial concepts; she started working more with light, sound, and texts based on translated lived experiences through the same methodology she used before, but with a more focused intention.
This bridge between the personal and the artistic was the work that I presented at the Rotterdam Film Festival, it’s called OTHERWORLDS, the XR experience. I started working on it just before the invasion started. When I was in Ukraine during the pandemic, I remembered and revived my childhood fascination with folklore, and fairy tales, and magic — deeply rooted magic, so that’s what my work was already about and what I was inspired by. I’m on a bridge between phenomenology and magical seeing, specifically regarding the contemporary reality of decolonial perspectives.
OTHERWORLDS is Sophia’s multidimensional participatory experience that takes us into virtual and physical realities that use the Ukrainian pagan folklore, its rituals and traditions. She maintains the structure and intention of traditional pagan magic, but guides us while presenting them through her own visual and experiential language for what she calls “personal and communal transformation”. The piece invites the audience to experience a sort of sensory overload that takes you out of everyday reality and revives your imagination by letting you make new connections with nature, technology, and people around you. It’s a hyper-contemporary, new age, transformative, and immersive ritual-experience rather than anything that could be contained in a singularity.
I was studying in the Netherlands from 2015 to 2019 and then I stayed in the Netherlands for a while. I was in Ukraine during the pandemic for a few months, but in 2021 I came back to the Netherlands. I was in Ukraine for New Year’s Eve 2022, when everybody was talking about the war, whether something’s gonna start or not. I was there with my ex-partner, and when he went back to Belgium, I stayed in Ukraine. I felt like I needed to go to Odessa. I don’t know why, but I did, and so I went. I left Ukraine on the 20th of January, a month before the full-scale invasion started, and still, nobody believed anything would happen. Everybody was kind of strange, though. The atmosphere was weird, but everything was running at full speed. When I came back to the Netherlands, I started getting more and more anxious. I had this show in February in Portugal, so I was in Lisbon when the full-scale invasion started. I was having dinner with the organisers of the exhibition and some friends who were also a part of our show. There was a press conference with Russia, with Putin, when he announced that he recognised the Donetsk and Lugansk republics — I was like, oh, no, we’re cooked. I was really distressed. And then somehow, the next day was quiet, like eerily quiet. I was asking myself — why is it so quiet? What’s happening? A day later, I woke up because my friends were calling me, my parents were calling me. But I was in Lisbon, and I had no idea what to do. I told myself there was no point in running anywhere because I couldn’t go back to Ukraine. It wasn’t possible. Everybody was in absolute shock.
After that her work changed. She was in a phase of perfecting works that she had started during her studies, but after the full-scale invasion started, she began to work more through these kinds of very phenomenal, very immaterial concepts; she started working more with light, sound, and texts based on translated lived experiences through the same methodology she used before, but with a more focused intention.
This bridge between the personal and the artistic was the work that I presented at the Rotterdam Film Festival, it’s called OTHERWORLDS, the XR experience. I started working on it just before the invasion started. When I was in Ukraine during the pandemic, I remembered and revived my childhood fascination with folklore, and fairy tales, and magic — deeply rooted magic, so that’s what my work was already about and what I was inspired by. I’m on a bridge between phenomenology and magical seeing, specifically regarding the contemporary reality of decolonial perspectives.
OTHERWORLDS is Sophia’s multidimensional participatory experience that takes us into virtual and physical realities that use the Ukrainian pagan folklore, its rituals and traditions. She maintains the structure and intention of traditional pagan magic, but guides us while presenting them through her own visual and experiential language for what she calls “personal and communal transformation”. The piece invites the audience to experience a sort of sensory overload that takes you out of everyday reality and revives your imagination by letting you make new connections with nature, technology, and people around you. It’s a hyper-contemporary, new age, transformative, and immersive ritual-experience rather than anything that could be contained in a singularity.
Photos: Paulus van Dorsten
Images: Otherworlds Fiber second demo
The second work is SPOMYNY (memories or memoirs) and involves the aforementioned pipes. When I first saw it on Instagram, it immediately caught my attention. I wanted to know more about what’s up with these pipes, so I visited her website to find out more about this peculiar-looking installation. It’s an experience into what the Russian attacks felt like to her and her loved ones in the form of “sonic artefacts” she has collected since February 2022. The viewer is physically guided to discover one channel at a time in this non-linear narrative, scattered across meters and meters of insulation pipes through which accounts of war by different people dear to Sophia are told. Hence, the viewer navigates lights and sounds one at a time, forced to explore the installation one account after another as they direct one of many pipes to their ear to hear each memory separately. There is an effort required to be made physically, in order to hear the memories.
Her work speaks for itself and exists by itself, like a machine, or a creature. It’s just there, existing, and the viewer, curious or even enchanted by its structure, is eager to find out what may happen if they participate in its being.
Sophia’s art is not something defined, something finite, something that can fit into a category. It’s quite the opposite, she manages to find ways to draw the audience in through their interaction with the media she chooses. She doesn’t take the audience by the hand, showing them gently what she wants to communicate.
At the end of our talk, I asked Sophia if she’s ever been to Luxembourg. She said she’s never visited, but she’s looking forward to it and it’s been a long time coming. So just like this interview offered us a chance to speak and get to know each other, the publication of it might just be the reason for Sophia to come and visit the Rainbow Centre. I can’t wait to see her share her unique perspective and even more unique pieces through which we get to discover her world with our local audience.
