Lora Krasteva - Interview

Lora Krasteva is a white, Eastern-European performance maker, culture producer and activist with Bulgarian and EU citizenship. She acquired British citizenship after living in the UK for 10 years. She has lived in Bulgaria, Algeria, Tunisia, Spain, France, Argentina and the UK.

Lora's portrait

Lora explained how the concept of “home” was an internal feeling for her:

·       “Home is a feeling that starts from inside you, something that you build, and you can take it away with you but it starts from within.”

·       “I used to say, you know, home is, where my mom is, but then you grow up and you realize your mom is not going to be around for forever. So, you can't pin that on one person.”

I then asked her to describe her identity:

·       “Identity is very context dependent.”

·       “A white person from Eastern Europe that grew up in the Bulgarian culture at home, I'm also a francophone. I'm female woman. I am a polyglot. I'm an artist. I’m a foodie. I am a transnational person.”

·       “I understand and deal with the world through creative expression, that some people might consider art.”

When describing her personality, Lora highlighted how it was in some ways context dependent on cultural norms and that she continues to interrogate aspects of her behaviour and self-perception:

·       “I think I'm an extrovert. I am very curious. I'm quite direct, especially in the British context.”

·       “I'm in the business of making stuff happen.”

·       “I would like to think that I am quite sincere and open minded. I could be sometimes a bit stubborn and impatient.”

·       “There's something that I'm figuring out at the moment. Am I not consistent? Or is that the belief that I have about myself that I need to adjust?”

Lora preferred not to dwell on her experience of cruelty, although she has experienced many instances of discriminatory treatment based on her ethnicity and gender throughout her life, because of her other privileges in life which have equipped her with the skills to cope with those negative experiences:

·       “That's not something that I want to either dwell on or remember or highlight, because I think that there's so much more injustice in the world that needs that air-time and I think I have been privileged and blessed to have the tools to deal with those instances.”

·       “Some of those micro-aggressions have been normalized, I have had it since I was tiny at the playground onwards, and I hated people saying, Go back to your country. And with time, if you hear something often, it loses its power over you.”

·       “I've had also instances, where people are patronizing or over explaining or mansplaining or not letting me speak, or speaking over me, interrupting me, either because you’re a foreigner or because you're a woman or because you're young.”

·       “Things that sound really nice, but they aren't like, Oh, your English is so good, and talking slowly to you because you're read as a foreigner, or people lying in your face, and you're like, I actually know I’m right.”

·       “I do feel that there are levels to aggressions and discriminations, and I have been lucky to be on the softer side of that spectrum because of my other privileges, like my education, the fact that I'm white means that I can stand up to people when maybe others could not.”

Lora emphasised the necessity of working to fit in with communities, making efforts to connect with like-minded people to gain a sense of belonging. She expressed her affinity for Latin American culture as well as her difficulty relating to people who take themselves too seriously:

·       “The default position is that people don't fit anywhere, but you have to do stuff and connect with people to find your tribe. That's what life is about – finding your place and creating your circle.”

·       “When I was a young child, I didn’t fit in because I was a foreigner and because I was taller than everyone else. Then, when I was 12, I moved to Spain and people asked “Who are you? What are you?” because I didn’t speak Spanish, I didn’t dress like them and I came from a completely different socio economic background. I remember eating my lunch in the toilets, like complete cliché. At university, I would see people being so passionate about politics and wanting to be the next politicians, but that was not my vibration - I feel like I often don't fit in in places where people are very serious about who they are. And as a self-taught artist, you often feel that you don't fit in the creative industry.”

·       “There is always a sense of fitting in, learning the law of the land, morphing into the society, but also still be me enough not to betray who I am.”

·       “When I was traveling in Latin America, there was a moment where I was saying in my past life I was probably from Chile, because I really connected to the land, to people, to some ways of thinking and some ways of making art.”

·       “I feel like I’ve grown this muscle of adapting and understanding as I’ve grown up, so I have this mindset where I can express and be myself in a slightly different way in different places, but I keep the core of me, so that there's no compromises around that.”

·       “I don’t fit in places where people are very serious about themselves, like more corporate places, where people don't have that space for a little bit of humor and a little bit of silliness.”

The communities which Lora feels closest too in Sheffield, are the International Women in Sheffield community as well as the community of artists at her studio in Rotherham:

·       “There is an international community of migrants in Sheffield that has been galvanized by a specific person, Livia [read Livia’s interview here]. And I feel really connected to those people, knowing that this exists makes me very happy, and I believe that I'm part of that.”

·       “I have a studio in Rotherham, and there's something about that Rotherham artistic community that has felt very welcoming. And I feel very connected to my colleagues in the migrants in theatre movement, because I realized the barriers that we've been facing professionally, are to do with systemic issues of British theater, not necessarily that we’re mediocre.”

Lora described her passion for community building and creative dialogue, as well as the importance of speaking different languages:

·       “Getting people together and figuring out the world - that is probably my biggest passion, and that can show up in different ways; it can be performance, a workshop, it can even be a discussion; I also really like to talk.”

·       “Creativity changes you, therefore creativity changes the world.”

·       “I do feel like Spanish comes from the gut and that is sometimes very satisfying, but I also love French, yeah, and Bulgarian is just home. And then English, well it's colonized my brain, but it's very effective in getting across simple ideas, because it's a simpler language, in my opinion.”

Lora requested colours for her portrait and flag which were not primary colours, reflecting her cultural hybridity. She deliberated over possible options for symbols, eventually deciding on intersecting triangles, representing her directness and passion for connecting people.

·       “I like purples, mainly because they're mixed of different colors. So you've got from your lilacs, to your deep purples, to your pinks, I love it. I don't like prime colors that much as I like colours that have a mixture of different colors. But how does that relate to who I am? Maybe there is an aspect of creativity and that like not taking yourself too seriously. And I love black. You can be anyone in black.”

·       “I love the neon. I love neon yellow. I love neon green, and I love that in between where you're like, is this neon yellow? Is this neon green? The idea of a spectrum, where things are changing, it's about textures where the colour changes depending on how the light hits it.”

·       “I make these doodles where lots of things are connected, like lines and triangles. Straight lines are simple, it's a place of simplicity, and my brain can relax a little bit. And then if you cross them, you start to have a pattern, and then you can build on, but it's almost like the simplest the first ingredient is a straight line, then you can bend it and make circle.”

·       “a stylized version of mountains, which can be misconstrued as, a heartbeat - maybe some sort of peaks.”

·       “Most flags are three bands of color, and I feel this is too simple to express an identity. So, it's more about a pattern or things intertwining, like this idea of the tartan.”

Lora gave me some additional insight to reflect on the subject of flags, which she described as a “flattening of identity” perhaps emphasising the limitations of my creative research methodology:

·       “The nation state project, had a particular point of view of deliberately flattening differences and creating this idea of one nation, one territory, one identity, which in many cases is a fabrication.”

·       “How do you celebrate the multiplicity of each individual and therefore how does this tapestry come together to show that we're much more than a national identity. We're much more than one color.”

·       “It's interesting that you take the narrative of a flag and then try and unpack that. And also, there's no failure in art.”

·       “Flags are aggressive and hostile and linked to historical or everyday abuses, like fascists and football hooligans. And it just goes back to this thing about nations, nations, nations, nations.”

·      “I can't help the feeling that a flag is a flattening of identity to say this is one nation, one people, one territory. I know for a fact that that is a lie, and a flag is just the physical representation of a lie that is very powerful.”

Lora's flag

Find all the interviews from my 'Kaleidentity' poject on my blog!