The career path of an artist is much less straightforward than many people tend to think. There are many with a very diverse and unexpected vocational or educational background, which is one of the reasons that the art scene is so interesting. We spoke with Radina Kordova (Varna (Bulgaria), 1994) in her studio about her past and her artistic practice.
“I came to the Netherlands to study because I was in search of a way to develop myself creatively. I had been to the country before and I enjoyed the atmosphere enough to actually apply for art school. Enrolling in the Fine Art programme at Academie Minerva changed my life completely. Before it, I was an unmolded piece of clay with a diverse background in professional basketball and Industrial Design, neither of which provided me with the creative input that I longed for. The Fine Art programme at Minerva gave me a toolkit with which I got to know myself. It was also at Minerva that I started being interested in production and curating. I like helping others and talking to people about their work, and this is something I still do every day. In a way, for me this is similar to the act of sculpting and installation in the sense that you are putting things together and you are making things happen.
After my graduation in 2019 I tried to figure out how everything in the art world works and at the same time I became interested in environmentalism and ecology. I realised that I used a lot of different materials for my installations and by doing so I aided in creating a lot of waste. In an effort to reduce my impact on the environment, I started working with sound instead, while also reducing and reusing old material from previous works. I have no musical background, so I approach sound very intuitively with a sculptural attitude. Sound is a non-tangible material, yet I can still shape, layer and stretch the soundscape way that is akin to as you would a sculpture. Meanwhile, during the start of the pandemic I was also involved in the organisation of an online exhibition space called Homescreen. There were a lot of subjects that I didn’t touch upon during my Bachelor studies, and I realised quickly that I wanted to have some time to explore some new things and gain more insight into my own artistic practice. So, I enrolled into the MADtech Master’s programme at the Frank Mohr Institute to work on all of this.
In my work I want to combine technology, sound,video, 3D graphics and software, installations, ecology, narration, storytelling and more in a super packed, dense performance/installation/production. I am trying to create atmospheres which are inspired by eco-punk attitudes and I am looking to find a sweet spot in being inspired by and working with technology, but with a magical essence, eco witch and feminist notions to it. My work ranges from performances, in which I can shout out my thoughts, to installations or environments where people can have their own thoughts and draw their own conclusions. Currently I am working on a performance, parts of which have been shown at gallery Sign, that has a very dystopian, almost sinister sound. I experience the world in a similar manner, yet in my work I like to look for ways in which we can look forwards and to provide people with hope and a sense of optimism. The sense of hope in my work comes, I think, through activistic narration, punk attitudes, water metaphors and rituals. I think as a society we need to go through a transformation if we want to turn things around, and the only way I could imagine that this would happen is if something truly apocalyptic would happen. Not even the pandemic changed anything significantly, everything very quickly went back to the same old same old. Yet I still fully support change, solidarity and symbiotic relationships between nature and technology and this is what I want to express in my work.”