A Phantasmagoria on Balkan Taxis
‘In The Ruinous Anytime: A Phantasmagoria on Balkan Taxis’ is a Master thesis project finalized into a book and then later presented in a series of ongoing lecture-performances.
The thesis was written with the help and supervision of Elisa Giuliano and Dr. Ana Teixeira Pinto.
In a collaboration with Angela Fusco and her thesis project, In The Ruinous Anytime contributed to the short film and catalogue of ‘an incarnation, or a possession, we cannot say’.
Still from ‘letter hauntings’, a short video montage presenting the thesis at Laundromat.86.
“Alex Karapancsev’s In the Ruinous Anytime is a work of remarkable intellectual and creative daring, a thesis that refuses to be contained by conventional academic boundaries. Operating simultaneously as critical theory, Gothic fiction, and curatorial manifesto, it performs the very hybridity it advocates, positioning its author as both maker and critic, both scholar and medium. Like the phantasmagorias it describes, the work resists categorization, shimmering unsettlingly between genres, at once rigorously analytical and poetically incantatory, both a deconstruction of historiography and an experiment in storytelling.
At the heart of Karapancsev’s project is the concept of the “gothumentary”—a fusion of documentary rigor and Gothic fabulation that challenges the positivist assumptions underlying Western historiography. This is no mere stylistic choice but an epistemological intervention on the history of Bulgaria, one that finds its perfect expression in the thesis’s own structure. The work moves fluidly between scholarly critique of Critical Balkanology’s limitations and creative experimentation with “untellable” histories, between theoretical framework and fictional practice. This dual identity isn’t just a feature of the thesis but its very methodology, a way of knowing through both analysis and imagination. Nowhere is this more evident than in the work’s treatment of Saint George, which exemplifies its alchemical approach to history. Rather than simply analyzing the saint’s syncretic mythology, the text becomes syncretic itself, weaving together Walter Benjamin’s dialectical images with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Ottoman tax records with Bulgarian folk demons.
This thesis isn’t a conventional argumentation but what might be called historiographic possession—a mode of engagement where the past isn’t so much examined as channeled, where scholarly distance collapses into visceral encounter. The result is a kind of intellectual séance, where historical analysis bleeds into creative invocation. The three gothumentaries that form the core of the thesis—Tortoises and Oranges, Procession of Forgiveness, and Vamp&Go!—are neither simple case studies nor illustrative examples, but rather mediums in the spiritualist sense: vessels through which Bulgaria’s layered pasts speak in tongues. Each channels a different mode of historical possession, a distinct way of encountering what official histories have killed, suppressed, or erased.”
At the heart of Karapancsev’s project is the concept of the “gothumentary”—a fusion of documentary rigor and Gothic fabulation that challenges the positivist assumptions underlying Western historiography. This is no mere stylistic choice but an epistemological intervention on the history of Bulgaria, one that finds its perfect expression in the thesis’s own structure. The work moves fluidly between scholarly critique of Critical Balkanology’s limitations and creative experimentation with “untellable” histories, between theoretical framework and fictional practice. This dual identity isn’t just a feature of the thesis but its very methodology, a way of knowing through both analysis and imagination. Nowhere is this more evident than in the work’s treatment of Saint George, which exemplifies its alchemical approach to history. Rather than simply analyzing the saint’s syncretic mythology, the text becomes syncretic itself, weaving together Walter Benjamin’s dialectical images with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Ottoman tax records with Bulgarian folk demons.
This thesis isn’t a conventional argumentation but what might be called historiographic possession—a mode of engagement where the past isn’t so much examined as channeled, where scholarly distance collapses into visceral encounter. The result is a kind of intellectual séance, where historical analysis bleeds into creative invocation. The three gothumentaries that form the core of the thesis—Tortoises and Oranges, Procession of Forgiveness, and Vamp&Go!—are neither simple case studies nor illustrative examples, but rather mediums in the spiritualist sense: vessels through which Bulgaria’s layered pasts speak in tongues. Each channels a different mode of historical possession, a distinct way of encountering what official histories have killed, suppressed, or erased.”
- Excerpt from the written feedback of the thesis