Kapka Kassabova

"From a young age, I was instinctively drawn to stories of escape, adventure and the high seas. It wasn’t just that I was living in a society where I felt trapped, it was also because I was a reader and a dreamer. In retrospect, no matter where I grew up I probably would have dreamt of escape. But the fact that we were living behind the iron curtain fuelled that escapism."

"The trauma of half a century of social life based on lies is going to take several generations to heal, if it heals at all."

"It seems to me that untold histories that come from a very pure place of suffering and survival contain truth. Everything else is subject to question, really. Anything that comes to us through an official source—especially an official source attached to a national or religious agenda, or any of those other identity politics that seem to bedevil the world at the moment—is questioned. I felt that the voices I was hearing, the places from which these stories came to me, were genuine and, therefore, very precious. The stories in themselves contained both the questions and the answers about identity, or about what borders do to people and how they survive."

"Traumas, or very powerful, primal experiences, especially when they’re experienced by large numbers of people, have a tendency to affect everything they touch. At that border, it wasn’t just one person who died. It was many, untold numbers—mouths full of earth. I think when you have a massive collective experience like that, the trauma remains in the earth. I think the earth has a memory, trees have a memory, rivers have a memory. If we’re a little bit open to it, we pick it up…"