Native Birds

Bulgarian performance/visual artist Katherina Radeva’s new piece, Native Birds, is a performance incorporating Bulgarian folklore, video, animation, and puppetry. The piece has its roots in the release of the six innocent Bulgarian nurses who were held captive in a Libyan prison from 1999 to 2007, wrongly convicted for purposefully infecting Libyan children with HIV. Ideas of abandonment, exile, periphery, and notions of freedom are central in Radeva’s work. In this project especially, she looks at the manifold elements that define what it is to be in “exile” and how these elements implicate the individual and the collective from which he/she is a part. In Native Birds, Radeva aims to draw parallels between the Bulgarian nurses’ position held captive in a foreign country and her own position as a Bulgarian living and working in London.