Bogomazov and Hermansen (theatre director and visual artist respectively) overcame the language barrier between them to find a joint project called Borderline: Don’t Look – a title inspired by the fact that when Bogomazov was in Constanta, for the first meeting of the SEAS platform, every time he tried to take photographs in the port someone tried to stop him saying “No photo”. The images he could not capture on film had to remain in his memory instead.
Hermansen and he found the ancient city of Sinop full of such special, faded memories – “ghosts”. But they also found that Sinop, despite its age and its archaeological heritage, is a city “that could be found anywhere in the world”. Hermansen interprets borders as surfaces between the exterior and the interior, like human skin. Bogomazov, inspired by this thought imagines the “body” as the “meeting place” of all history – biological (interior history, DNA, inheritance etc) and external history (historical monuments, museums, landscapes, the sea itself etc).
Eventually they decided to work in parallel rather than together, but both working with the human voice – Hermansen in her soundscape Borderline using the prayers of three religions and Bogomazov in his work Sweet Dreams which used the text of the ghost scene from Shakespeare’s Richard III intoned by the actors to a composed score by Danill Pertsov.