Project Description
Pauline Shongov
FSC-Harvard Fellow 2021-22, 2022-23
Pauline Shongov is a PhD candidate in Film and Visual Studies with secondary fields in Anthropology and Critical Media Practice at Harvard University. Her work engages oral, visual, and material histories of place within archeological methodologies on media and landscape theory. Through the study of ruination, archaeology, and alternative practices of care, her films explore cultural mythologies and folkloric traditions, collective memories and imaginaries, local and diasporic forms of community belonging. She holds a concurrent degree in B.F.A. in Fine Arts and B.A. in College Scholar of Film from Cornell University as part of the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and the College of Arts and Sciences. With the support of the FSC, she is working on a series of experimental ethnographies and docufictional films that center on a visual archeology of the Balkan space.
FSC Works
City Digs (work-in-progress)
Pauline Shongov
A series of films explore the epithet раскопания град (raskopania grad), meaning “excavated city,” across various provinces in Bulgaria. Where acts of digging bring archaeological excavations in proximity to ruination and repair work on city infrastructures, the figure of the hole evokes specters of both the past and present.
Eastern (work-in-progress)
Pauline Shongov
Thirty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, two pensioners embark on their first road trip across the American Southwest.
What makes the rocks blue? (work-in-progress)
Pauline Shongov and Maya Shopova
Where the shadow of the Blue Rock Mountains looms large over the once-booming industrial town of Sliven in eastern Bulgaria, stories of copper meteorites, Thracian gold, uranium, and ghost sightings begin to surface. Following foragers, treasure hunters, foresters, and clairvoyants on their journeys through the mountain, this film unearths a cryptic history on what makes the rocks blue.